McPherson's creates AI agent for key account teams

McPherson’s Consumer Products, the owner of health and beauty brands like Manicare, Dr Lewinn’s and Maseur, has built an AI agent with Salesforce to help its key account teams craft more effective trade promotions and have better conversations with retailers.

McPherson's CIO Nathan Alexander speaks at Dreamforce.

Speaking at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, chief information officer Nathan Alexander likened the agent to a plane’s autopilot, relieving people of repetitive tasks while ensuring they remained ‘in the loop’ and in control.

“Our KAM [key account manager] agent is very much the same,” Alexander said.

“Instead of our key account teams having to spend huge amounts of time creating trade promotions, they can very quickly ask the agent: ‘Tell me about what the leading promotion tactics for these particular customers are’ and it will surface that. 

“It'll then allow us to actually create promotions, and we can edit those promotions, so we can change the time bands in those promotions, we can change parameters within those promotions. 

“The agent is really unlocking productivity, which means that instead of spending all their time on promotions, our key account teams can actually start to have better … [and] more strategic conversations around how we're investing our trade spend with them.”

Trade promotions are used to “help increase demand for a brand’s products in stores by offering retailers discounts, displays, and events that help [to] market items to consumers,” according to Salesforce.

They encompass “in-store merchandising and support”, including “the planning, management, and execution of these promotional activities”, with the aim of increasing shelf space allocation and sales.

Alexander said that optimising trade promotion spend isn’t about “investing less” in the promotions space, but instead about using data to have more “strategic selling conversations with our retail partners about how we both win.”

McPherson’s products are sold through “over 15,000 pharmacies and grocery chains across Australia,” Alexander said.

The agent is an extension of a multi-year program of work aimed at improving retail execution and trade promotions management, supported by the consumer goods flavour of Salesforce’s CRM, which is called consumer goods cloud.

“When we started this journey, we didn't have any connected view of our customer,” Alexander said.

“For our field teams, they were spending up to 50 percent of their time on administration, and that basically meant that they weren't in front of our customers selling. 

“[In addition], when we think about our trade promotions management … we had no visibility into how that money was actually being invested or spent. 

“We partnered with Salesforce on consumer goods cloud to actually start to be able to measure promotion mechanics and tactics, and drive return-on-investment for our [trade] customers … [by] driving our field teams to the right customers at the right time and getting them to talk about the right products.”

Alexander said that standing up the agent was relatively straightforward, taking around a day “to set up the parameters” and deploy it into its environment for testing.

“Essentially, we set the agent up ourselves based on the instructions from the Salesforce team,” Alexander said.