Uniting sales and marketing
Signorino says he found that the sales force had a great deal of knowledge about what consumers were looking for as a result of their experience on the front lines. The problem was that the information and ideas weren’t going anywhere.
He needed to find a way to break down the internal silos.
“Sales and marketing didn’t overlap a lot,” says Signorino. “I wanted sales to bring ideas to marketing. They have great ideas, and I wanted those to flow both ways. In a company the size of Chicken of the Sea, driving profitable growth through the base business and new products requires seamless sales and marketing execution.
“When these functions are split, it is more difficult to achieve such execution. Since the margins in this business are tight, you need your marketing to stay close to your customer to make sure everyone is effectively building that relationship and gaining insights at the consumer and customer level.”
He hired a new vice president for sales and marketing and combined the departments. In addition, he realigned the priorities of the marketing function to allow people to spend more time on promoting new product releases.
In the food business, packaging and product presentation on the shelf are major contributors to successful sales and market share. Signorino also saw it as an area where the company could gain an advantage over the competition.
“I think that the shelves in the seafood isles look cluttered,” says Signorino. “We are redesigning our packaging and graphics so that the products work synergistically with each other. In some cases, our products are separated into different areas of the store, in other cases, they are clustered together. We are using common color trays so that we stick out more, whether the products are displayed in a singular fashion or collectively.”
Successfully managing shelf space is a major responsibility of the sales force, and Signorino went back to the fundamentals to ensure that the team would be competent at transferring the concept from the training room to the store shelves.
“We went back to the basics and retrained our sales team on blocking and tackling,” says Signorino. “We created a new manual that covers the basics on where we want to be on the store shelf in order to achieve market share.”
For many years, Chicken of the Sea relied on television ads featuring the mermaid logo to help drive brand loyalty. After a hiatus of almost 14 years, Signorino developed a new television ad that uses humor to create brand familiarity with a younger base of consumers while driving home a message that equates tuna with healthfulness.
“There is equity in our brand, but we need to bring it back,” he says. “There’s a whole new generation that didn’t grow up with the mermaid jingle and doesn’t know the brand.”