Operational Questions Flashcards
What’s your experience in marketing/supply chain/merchandising?
- I have experience with writing e-mail campaigns and some experience with social media
- Brand manager for New World / Old World wine: pricing, inventory management, purchase orders, marketing, staff training and education.
How do you use P&L as category manager?
Gross margin: Within category. Differs for beer/spirits/wine.
- Contribution margin: Picking/packaging/shipping/delivery/marketing within category and across all categories. (i.e. Are we making money delivering this product/basket of products to the customer)
Share an experience in which you introduced new merchandise to sales personnel with good results.
- Sometimes having reps tell other reps about a product is the best selling tactic.
- I was responsible for a small Australian supplier and had introduced a new orange wine within a product to the market; and only let select reps pull samples of the wine.
- We initially had limited availability but purposely held back supply to have the most vocal reps plead their case for retail and on-premise customers.
- We sold 100cs in three months , more than the annual sales of the rest of the product line.
What internal teams should a category manager collaborate with and why?
- Storefront: How to promote products/categories on splash page; weekly/seasonal promotions
- Replenishment: Maintain appropriate inventory and par levels
- Master Data: Maintain accurate and competitive pricing across all items
- Cross-Department: Does selling one item help selling a category in alcohol and vice versa?
Share an experience when you applied new technology or information in your job. How did it help your company?
- A supplier asked for an easy-to-read monthly list of accounts sold by item within their portfolio
- This involved generating a pivot table of previous accounts sold cross-referenced by item
- The supplier used this a performance metric for her market visits in the NYC Metro market but also a checklist for account that she needed to follow up with.
Share an effective approach to working with a large amount of information/data. How has your approach affected your company?
- Receiving previous account sold data from a prior distributor
- Much of the data is incomplete and formatted in a manner that’s not immediately useful for a rep or brand manager
- I had a standard Excel template that would allow me to dump the data and have pre-selected values for various fields (i.e. On-Premise/Off-Premise) that would allow me to populate the missing information rapidly.
Provide a time when you worked in a rapidly evolving workplace. How did you deal with the change?
- Market visits involve customers cancelling appointments
- You need have a back up list of accounts that you can contact for appointments
- Sometimes you walk by a retail store or restaurant that would be a good fit for the product: “I noticed that you might need a Northern Rhone wine, and I happen to be in the area with Producer X. Would you like to taste his/her wines?”
Share an experience in which you worked closely with a vendor helped you obtain or develop a high-demand product.
- I had an excellent working relationship with an supplier, and found a niche in the NYC market for an orange wine that could work at a $15 BTG price point in restaurants and $20 at retail
- I constantly monitored inventory at their CA warehouse, and agreed to take half of their US allotment across two purchases.
If hired, you will be managing the effectiveness of suppliers. Have you ever held a position that required you to oversee others’ operations?
- As a brand manager, I had to set up marketing visits for winemakers, promotional events and dinners for importers, and generate target account lists for external sales teams in the market
- I ran post-mortem analysis for all these event and use this information to adjust marketing strategy for future market engagement
Recall a time you had to negotiate with a supplier. Tell me a negotiate that you were happy and unhappy with.
- Requested deeper 5cs pricing on Australian Shiraz and supporting depletion allowance so product could sell at sub-$10 retail; 5cs price made placement more likely to stick at retailers since they would case stack it, and supplier could easily support DA from increased GP dollars from 5cs price (win-win)
- Rose supplier set initial target for Year 2 sales for 4,000 cases (previous year was 700 cases. This was clearly a negotiation strategy to get us to commit to a higher level of depletions. We stated that we could commit to 2,000 cases and as a company only committed to sales goals that we thought we could achieve. We agreed to 4,000 cases as a stretch goal, and actually hit that target.
Tell me about a time you helped boost sales for a product category
- Arranged sales trip incentive programs for Rioja and Friuli producers
- Set up points incentive program for new placements at on and off-premise retailers
- Tracked and updated scoreboard for all reps on a biweekly basis
- Sold more wine in three months for each supplier than we did in previous year
What are some long-range objectives that you developed in your last job? What did you do to achieve them?
- As a brand manager, we were required to negotiate annual depletion targets for our suppliers.
- We projected from previous years depletions in the aggregate, but also by item.
- I set up Gantt (timeline) charts for monthly promotions and pricing and potential market visits.
