Malt-O-Meal Reverses Sales Decline with Demand Intelligence

Faced with price hikes that were causing progressive decreases in sales volume, Malt-O-Meal’s Tracey Mankowski, key account sales manager, made repeated presentations to her buyer. “Each time the price was increased, I spent hours importing data, running calculations and creating a presentation that I could share with my buyer,” she says. “But what I put together for him just didn’t make an impact—so the higher price points stayed in place.”

When Malt-O-Meal, a manufacturer of breakfast cereal, partnered with LumiData, a provider of demand intelligence solutions, and installed SOLYS, everything changed. LumiData’s SOLYS software solution delivers point-of-sale demand intelligence reports to allmembers of a consumer goods sales team. “I didn’t spend my time pulling information from InfoRetriever, crunching numbers and creating reports because SOLYS did that for me,” Mankowski explains.

Instead, she utilized an SKU ranking report to identify store counts and low numbers that indicated losses in sales. Once she had identified the items that were seeing marked decreases in sales due to the price increases, she ran an item synopsis report and presented it to the buyer. “I presented a one-page snapshot of the items—sales dollars, average price, inventory measures, lifts, distribution center data— everything. The price/volume comparison is what really told the story—it clearly illustrated what the price increases had done to the volume. I also showed the buyer weekly supply and in-stock reports to prove that these elements weren’t a factor in the decreased volume.”

As a result, Mankowski and the buyer successfully adjusted the price points and sales recovered.

In less than six months, Malt-O-Meal was able to reverse a loss in sales due to price hikes and identify supply chain challenges that had restricted its growth in volume. Going forward, Mankowski plans to take part in a retail joint-business planning exercise, working to grow retailer private label volume.