How to Rally the Team Around Your Promo Calendar

It’s late January and the year seems to be moving quickly and be at a standstill at the same time. 

I touched on it last week, but it does seem like a lot of CPG right now is waiting. 

Waiting on funding, hires, and decisions while everything continues to move ahead in the background. My belief is that Q1 as a whole will continue to be a wait and see period for the industry as we navigate the type of year it will be from a macroeconomic perspective, but at the end of the day brands and businesses need to move forward. 

Moving forward with a plan is key and to me having a comprehensive promotional calendar that is accessible to your whole team is crucial for retail success. 

Marketing has their content calendar and sales has their review calendar, but your promotional calendar should be a communal internal resource where all stakeholders can prepare for how they need to best support the retail promotions that are planned. 

Let’s take a closer look at how the key stakeholders inside your company should be working with your promotional calendar and some tips on how to set it up to get maximum buy-in. 

First, Vividly who helps with all things related to trade promotions had an exciting announcement to share! 

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Vividly Secures $30M to Transform CPG Financial Operations 

Managing trade promotions and financial operations in the CPG space has long been a complex challenge — but we’re out to change that. Fresh off a successful year managing over $2.6 billion in trade spend, we’re thrilled to share that we’ve secured $30M in Series B funding led by Centana Growth Partners to expand into the office of CPG finance with our AI-powered solutions.

What started as a leading trade promotion management platform has evolved into something bigger. We’re now pioneering new frontiers in CPG financial technology, with groundbreaking solutions like Transcend AI for predictive insights and Cash Application for streamlined payment matching.

This funding will accelerate our mission to redefine CPG financial operations. We’re expanding our AI capabilities, automating manual workflows, and building new financial tools specifically for CPG brands. With over 2,500 professionals already using the platform and 50 industry-leading brands onboarded in 2024 alone, let us show that there’s a better way to mange trade and financial operations.

Want to see how Vividly's expanding suite of solutions can transform your CPG operations? Learn more at govividly.com

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The reason why a promotional calendar if properly set up can be the lifeblood of your team's daily retail activities is it keeps the whole team aligned on what is coming up and the retail focal points for that month. 

Retail promotions are not a set it and forget type of action. 

Instead you should use your promotional calendar as a single source of truth for where each department's priorities should be when it comes to supporting not just your upcoming promotions, but your overall retail strategy. 

Here is how each department and stakeholder should be looking at the promotional calendar. 

Sales is the most obvious stakeholder, but not just because they are the ones who set the promotional calendar with the buyer in most cases, but because they are usually the ones who have to determine if the promotion was a success or not. 

We can’t measure success if we don’t know what it looks like. The sales team should be asking their buyer, broker, or distributor contact what the historical lift has been for each promotion type they are running for each individual account and inputting the expected lift into the promotional calendar. This way the merchandising team and operations team can ensure there is enough inventory ahead of time for the expected lift, but more importantly so you can measure if the promotion was a success or not after. 

If you're running a BOGO and your results are 25% lower than other brands in the category, you might need to assess if that is the correct promotion and test another promotion type quickly. Most buyers and brokers will simply tell you what has worked for other brands in the past, but that does not necessarily mean it will work for your brand. You want to test and iterate quickly throughout this process to find the promotional mix that works best for your brand. 

The results need to be retroactively inputted after each promotion so that when planning your next year's calendar everyone has access to those results.  

Also, if I am leading the sales team, I would use the promotional calendar as my framework for how I am keeping my buyer relationships warm throughout the whole year. 

I am setting up a sequence to trigger before the promotion goes live to remind the buyer, I am having the merchandising team send me an image from the store to confirm inventory and signage which is then getting sent to the buyer, then I am diving into the data to see the lift from the promotion as well as the trailing lift from the weeks following which I would then turn into a report for the buyer. 

You want your buyer contacts to understand that you weren’t just invested when you wanted to get into their stores, but remain invested to stay in those stores. 

I mentioned them twice, but the next key stakeholder is the merchandising or field team. 

Having an internal promotional calendar that is accessible to everyone enables them to clearly see where their priorities are for the upcoming month. 

It’s detrimental to the success of the promotion when you have a promotion planned and the signage is incorrect, the inventory is low, or worse yet - you're paying for the promotion and it wasn’t passed down to the consumer. 

You need boots on the ground who are ensuring your promotions have a chance at success and having a dynamic promotional calendar enables them to have a clear plan of action without having to constantly go to sales. 

I would have the field team upload an image to the calendar the day the promotion goes live, so management can feel confident that it's being executed correctly, but also so it can be the green light for marketing to start promoting on their end. 

Marketing is the next key stakeholder. I know from working closely with brands that very few brands are tying their in-store promotions with their digital marketing strategy. 

Announcements don’t always have to be around new product or retail launches, you can build content around your promotional calendar and help boost the in-store sales numbers while you're at it. 

Promotions are key to driving trial, but it’s also key in moving a lot of units to your core customers in a short period of time. You want to be telling your audience when your product is on promotion and driving customers into the store with the intent to buy and not just rely on organic discovery of the offer. 

Tying in-store promotions with an additional digital rebate also empowers the marketing team to see how many customers they drove from online to in-store from the receipt data obtained and lower the reimbursement threshold you have to pay on the rebate since the SRP is lower in the store now. 

Marketing should always be looking at the promotional calendar and seeing how they can boost the performance by engaging their digital audience. 

Having these departments work in unison enables the operations, finance, and ownership teams to plan inventory runs more effectively and be able to better forecast the budgets and future deductions around certain promotions. 

When it comes to actually making your promotional calendar, there are a host of different platforms and free templates available to make your 2025 promotional calendar, but the first step is unifying all your promotions. 

You might have some accounts that your sales director is managing while another is managed by a broker or another by your local DSD. You need to unify all those promotions in one place and be able to easily filter through to see what promotions you have planned at a given time and where. 

Once you unify the promotions, I would make sure all departments are setting up calendar reminders on their own two weeks ahead of each promotion that is scheduled to run. Using Zapier to send notifications to your company’s slack channel is also a great way to keep everyone on track. 

The promotional calendar should be editable for all team members who have access. You want it to look very different in December than it does in January. 

Having that dynamic promotional calendar that is a living and breathing document inside your company where everyone comes to get aligned on retail strategy and understand if it was successful or not is such an unlock for CPG brands. 

You can’t make decisions blind when it comes to your retail strategy and the entire team should understand what their responsibilities are when you're on promotion. 

That’s it for this week! Let me know if you have any promotional calendar tips in the comments.