Are you involved in the world of wholesale planning, striving to meet your sales goals while maximizing profitability? In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the ins and outs of wholesale planning with the help of Toolio. From pre-market preparation to in-season strategies, we'll cover it all, ensuring you have the knowledge and tools needed to make data-driven decisions and lead your business toward prosperity. This post is a summary of our Wholesale Webinar from November 2023. If you would like to watch the whole webinar, you can see it here.
Preparing for Success: Pre-Market Planning
Wholesale planning often begins with pre-market preparations. This phase is critical for balancing your revenue plan with your wholesale partners and setting the stage for what lies ahead. Here's how Toolio can help:
Advanced Planning and Collaboration
You can use Toolio to collaborate with your sales and finance teams, ensuring alignment and enabling the creation of your annual operating plan. This consolidated view allows you to keep track of your planned vs. actual performance in real time, promoting proactive decision-making.
Analyzing Margin Erosion
Toolio provides a comprehensive view of your gross margin, highlighting areas of erosion and allowing you to assess the impact of different pricing structures. This insight empowers you to make data-informed decisions about how to improve profitability.
Channel Mix Management
With Toolio, managing your channel mix is a breeze. Whether it's retail sales, direct-to-consumer, or wholesale, you can easily break down your sales by channel, account type, category, and more, gaining a clear picture of your business performance.
The Market Phase: A Balancing Act
As you navigate the market phase, your focus shifts to maintaining a delicate balance between revenue planning, sales, and inventory management. Toolio equips you to master this balancing act:
Real-Time Scenario Planning
Toolio allows for scenario planning, offering the flexibility to adapt to evolving conditions. By using data to adjust your discounts, allowances, and pricing, you can proactively address challenges and seize opportunities.
Tracking Bookings to Shipments
Tracking at-once orders (ATO) is critical for understanding your revenue plan and how well you're meeting it. Toolio's "Bookings to Go" feature provides real-time insights into what's been booked, what's been shipped, and what needs your attention, ensuring there are no surprises.
In-Season Planning
In-season planning is equally important. Here, Toolio offers a wealth of features for forecasting, tracking performance, and optimizing your business operations. With detailed schedules for open-to-buy and more, you can stay on top of your sales, receipts, and ongoing profitability.
Margin Dilution and Its Impact
Margin dilution, a significant concern in wholesale planning, can impact your bottom line. Toolio's detailed workflows and reports provide valuable insights into the sources of margin dilution, helping you maintain profitability.
Margin Dilution Tracking
Toolio's detailed schedules allow you to track your margin dilution throughout the quarter. This helps you identify which accounts are contributing to margin erosion and take the necessary actions.
Net Sales and Margin Tracking
By analyzing your net sales and margin on a granular level, Toolio enables you to make informed decisions regarding discounts, allowances, and inventory management, ultimately boosting your profitability.
Collaborative Teamwork for Success
Wholesale planning is a team effort, and Toolio ensures that you're working in harmony with sales, finance, and marketing teams to make informed decisions.
Team Collaboration
With data-driven insights, you can work together with different departments to optimize your strategies. Understand the performance of each channel, category, and account type, and leverage this information to make better decisions.
Sharing Insights
Sharing performance insights with your marketing, finance, and sales teams allows for more effective decision-making. You can craft targeted marketing materials, explore new opportunities, and boost your overall performance.
Conclusion: Time to Take Action
In conclusion, wholesale planning with Toolio provides a holistic approach to the complex process of balancing sales goals with profitability. It's about advanced forecasting, meticulous inventory management, and the ability to adapt to changing market conditions. By fostering collaboration across teams, you can make data-driven decisions that ensure each sale contributes positively to your business's profitability.
As you move forward with your wholesale planning journey, put the knowledge and insights gained from this guide into action. Explore Toolio's advanced features and capabilities to enhance your planning process. If you have any questions or require further guidance specific to your business, don't hesitate to reach out!
Your wholesale planning success is within reach, and Toolio is here to help you achieve it. Make data-driven decisions and lead your business to growth and prosperity.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to contact us.
