You’ve got great ideas, but you don’t always have the bandwidth to do them. When it comes to minimum advertised price monitoring, a smaller team doesn’t mean you can’t implement, monitor, and enforce MAP pricing across your reseller network.
The good news, though, is you don’t need a big team to get big results. Here is how you can enforce minimum advertised price violations as a small team:
1. Align Goals with Company Objectives
Start with a good look at your company objectives. What matters most to your executive team? In general, it’s increasing revenue and profits. However, there are usually more nuanced goals nestled in there that can help guide your MAP enforcement efforts.
For example, your company may have an objective to expand into new online marketplaces or grow the number of authorized retailers you partner with. Both of these objectives would directly benefit from better MAP monitoring and enforcement processes.
What does this mean for your small team? It means you can highlight the value of your efforts to your executives. You can clearly state what you do and why you do it—through the lens of their company objectives, of course—and easily show your successes by framing them around company objectives. All of this will make your life easier and your bosses happier.
As you oversee your minimum advertised price monitoring, you need to decide where and when you will spend your time.
2. Be Focused and Make Tough Choices
You have limited resources and time as a small team. Therefore, it’s a must that you remain focused and that you’re willing to make the tough choices with regard to your workload.
As you oversee your minimum advertised price monitoring, you need to decide where and when you will spend your time. Is it on monitoring your retailers? Tracking down MAP violations? Responding to violations? Following up with those resellers to ensure enforcement?
Odds are, you can’t do it all. Identify where your efforts are most needed and make the tough call to deprioritize the other tasks.
3. Only Spend Time on What You Can Measure
There are few things worse as a small team than being asked by your boss what you’ve been doing—and not really having a good answer.
Bandwidth is tight. Scrutiny is high. You must be able to clearly state what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That’s why you should only spend time on what you can measure. What does this mean? It’s a focus on data-driven insights and tactics. It means your day-to-day is spent experimenting and testing with clear hypotheses.
What it isn’t is hoping and praying that your efforts will pay off. It’s not doing something without a clear goal in mind, then not taking the time afterward to measure the results. Everything you do needs a purpose and the data to support it. That way, you’ve got a clear direction and the ability to convince your superiors that your way is the right way.
4. Be Able to Scale and Grow
Lastly, all your minimum advertised price monitoring and enforcement efforts need to have a future. They must be able to be scaled up as your team grows.
Sure, as a small team this may sound like a pipe dream. However, it’s very important at this stage that you do have an eye toward the future. For example, draft your MAP pricing policies to work whether you have 1 SKU or 1,000 SKUs. Include language that works for multiple retailers of various sizes, or make it customizable if you expand into new marketplaces.
Have systems in place to monitor and enforce violations whether those violations number in the single digits or triple digits. Don’t have a process that relies too heavily on manual labor because this becomes unsustainable the day that you do scale up. All in all, build your team like you’re a massive enterprise so you’re ready for anything.