Why Centana Invested in Vividly

Author: Matt Alfieri | Co-Authors: Jay Lee, Jake Madnick and Christopher Chen

Trade Promotion Management (TPM) – The Hidden Workflows Critical to the Success of Global Brands

As consumers, we all love a good discount as we reach for that second chocolate bar, but have you ever thought about what goes on behind the scenes? Behind every “buy one, get one” deal is a complex and critical process known as TPM. Trade promotions include discounts, rebates, coupons, and more, and are a key lever to effectively influence consumer buying behavior and securing prime shelf space. Managing these promotions is crucial in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, helping brands drive sales, grow market share, and strengthen retailer partnerships. With promotion costs accounting for 20–30% of a brand’s revenue, they are a key factor in achieving scale and profitability in brick-and-mortar retail1. Yet, it remains a highly inefficient process for brands, with McKinsey finding that 72% of promotions fail to return a profit. Many businesses rely on manual workflows, utilizing fragmented systems and legacy homegrown solutions like Excel (particularly when brands are just getting off the ground). While these methods may suffice for smaller brands, they become untenable as businesses scale. Fragmented and inconsistent data hinders a brand’s ability to extract actionable insights, optimize for profitable promotional strategies, and manage cash collection effectively.

These inefficiencies are not just operational headaches – they lead to real financial losses. Ineffective promotions and missed sales opportunities are compounded by mispayments and billing inaccuracies, with some brands having up to 40% of deductions being incorrectly processed2. The result is a process riddled with waste and complexity, leaving brands struggling to compete in today’s retail landscape.

Vividly Takes on the TPM Challenge

Vividly offers solutions designed to address the challenges of trade promotion management by providing a platform purpose-built to manage complexity and scale. By offering comprehensive software and services that bridge the needs of CPG brands and unifies previously siloed sales and finance functions, Vividly’s platform empowers brands to create, organize, and manage trade promotions with impressive ease and precision.

Streamlining complexity is a core differentiator of Vividly’s solution. Trade promotion activities are rightfully a headache across an organization, as they involve a mind-boggling array of price reductions, coupons, in-store displays, and product placements often tailored for each retailer and SKU3. This level of granularity, multiplied across geographies and retailer-specific requirements, introduces immense complexity as brands scale, often leading to misalignment between sales teams (which oversee promotion strategy and planning) and finance teams (which manage budgeting, reconciliation, and cash collection). By centralizing trade promotion data and workflows, Vividly enables brands to automate tedious processes, gain actionable insights, and improve decision-making. The result is a streamlined approach to TPM that not only addresses inefficiencies, but also enhances a brand’s ability to optimize revenue and cash collection practices as they grow.

Vividly’s offering also addresses deduction management, automating the highly manual process of collecting, indexing, and reconciling deductions with actual sales activities (an equally critical component of a brand’s revenue strategy). In the deduction management process, a retailer buys products at a wholesale price and sells them to consumers at a markup, applying trade promotions like discounts or rebates along the way. Instead of paying the full amount owed, the retailer deducts the value of these promotions and sends the brand the net payment with supporting documentation. Within this process, retailers often use their own unique formats for communicating what discounts have been applied, creating a complex reconciliation process prone to error and often resulting in significant financial losses for brands. Vividly’s AI-powered deduction management system, combined with its team of experts, helps automate this entire process – enabling brands to reclaim lost revenue and focus on growth.

Centana’s Proven Experience with Financial and Operational Software

Our investment in Vividly builds on Centana’s expertise in scaling platforms that combine automation, financial insights, and operational efficiency. Centana previously invested in Vena Solutions, known for simplifying corporate performance management by streamlining FP&A processes, enabling finance teams to plan, budget, and forecast more effectively. Centana also partnered with Plooto, which automates accounts receivable and payable workflows and enhances cash flow visibility and financial operations for thousands of SMBs. These partnerships demonstrate Centana’s ability to support companies addressing critical pain points in financial workflows through automation and actionable insights – aligning closely with Vividly’s approach for the CPG industry.

Our experience with companies like Vena and Plooto gives us a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing businesses working at the intersection of finance, sales, and operations, and helps us to support Vividly as it continues to address inefficiencies in trade promotion management and scale its platform to serve an expanding market.

What’s Ahead for Vividly

Vividly’s product roadmap reflects the company’s focus on innovation and growth. We are encouraged by the team’s vision to continue leveraging its AI capabilities to build intelligent and predictive automation (Transcend AI) and enhance modules like its payment-invoice matching engine (Cash Application). We are excited to be partnering with Johnathan Hodge (CEO), as well as Vividly’s leadership team, whose combined experience in CPG and technology has enabled the company to scale effectively and support a wide range of consumer brands. As we’ve come to know Johnathan, we’ve been impressed with his leadership style, clear product vision, and his ability to execute effectively at Vividly. We look forward to supporting Johnathan and the broader Vividly team as the company embarks on this next stage of its journey.

[1] McKinsey & Company. (2019, October). How analytics can drive growth in consumer-packaged-goods trade promotions.

[2]According to Vividly’s proprietary data.

[3] Stock keeping unit

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