CROSSMARK is a leading sales and marketing agency that specializes in growing retail brands throughout nearly every category of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. For more than 100 years, CROSSMARK has accelerated the world's most powerful companies, driving sales and managing brand success. The company's core services include headquarter sales, retail services, and marketing services. This includes e-commerce solutions, omnichannel expertise, insights and analytics, and order-to-cash, as well as both in-store and out-of-store consumer engagement.

Earlier this year CROSSMARK, whose Hacienda office was first established in the late 1990s, announced the national launch of Accelerator, a state-of-the-art data analysis platform for CPG sales and marketing activities. The custom platform was developed with industry partners IBM, Microsoft, and other leading technology companies. According to company officials, Accelerator combines one of the largest data sets in CPG with best-in-class analytics horsepower to deliver intuitive visualization of analytical tasks that are critical for smarter selling and faster growth.

Today, CPG operators have access to detailed information about virtually every transaction in supermarkets, drug stores, and mass merchants. The sheer volume of this data makes it challenging to sift through and find the important insights. Accelerator tackles that problem head-on with a design that weaves together different information sources to discover distinguishing insights and then recommends the best course of action. The platform is built to evolve over time by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities and ingesting new data sources. 

Developing Accelerator was an organizational priority involving hundreds of associates organized in cross-functional teams totaling over 100,000 hours of work over a 20-month period, according to the company, which reports that Accelerator is unique in the industry for having been built from scratch for the way a sales agency works. Accelerator was created using Microsoft PowerBI, a highly interactive visualization tool that makes data quick and easy to access and interpret. 

"Our sales teams can access Accelerator from anywhere using the PowerBI App, giving them on-demand access to the entire suite of solutions for every moment of truth with the customer," says Nawshi Williams, Vice President of Insights. "Accelerator will be the go-to tool for our associates to quickly analyze issues, uncover opportunities, and develop the best possible plan to exceed our clients' expectations. This platform is such a difference-maker that we decided to make it available to all of our headquarters clients, not just a select few."

"At CROSSMARK we believe everyone, from our senior leaders to the managers in the markets, needs to be using a consistent method that yields the best results," says CROSSMARK Sales Agency President Jami McDermid. "For that reason, during our Accelerator rollout plan, we made a purposeful and significant commitment to ensure consistency and revitalize efficiency. We call this way of training, working, and shared capabilities The CROSSMARK Way."

Combining instruction in selling, insights, category management, and e-commerce, the CROSSMARK Way creates a set of standards so that clients and customers experience a consistent and professional approach that delivers better business outcomes, according to the company. "Our value proposition has always been people, tools, and training," notes McDermid. 

"The combination of Accelerator and the CROSSMARK Way empowers our people to sell smarter and deliver faster growth to those we serve."

For more information about CROSSMARK, please visit www.crossmark.com.