For an effective business partnership with your distributor, some form of measurement will need to be in place with regard to sales. Having a defined set of targets is the best way of doing this. These annual sales targets should be in agreement with the distributor and will need to be reviewed on a regular basis. All of this should be in the distributor territory appointment contract. Review the sales by brand, by SKU, by key market, by key account at the Annual Meeting. If not achieved, develop new programs to help the distributor achieve the goals in the coming year.

One of the important element to discuss in your annual review meeting or a new distributor meeting is your promo and support plan. It is important to hit the right price point, to be competitive in the trade. To effectively do this with a multi-brand portfolio, you will need a price promotion calendar with staggered time periods—here is an example of how to successfully price promote different brands at different price promotion levels, creating FOCUS on the product line and maximizing the distributor’s sales reps efforts on all brands, and allowing even more brands to be added to the Calendar from other suppliers.

Here is a sample template of how you can prepare your annual promo plan.