What If We Could Take Care of 99% of Your MAP Enforcement Work?

The right MAP enforcement process needs to have all the right pieces in place to get your compliance rates up. Yet, many lack the right components, especially when doing things manually.

We’ll visit a scenario where things could go wrong if you’re manually monitoring and manually enforcing MAP, and why this is so. Then, we’ll take a peek at how Trade Vitality’s wham-bam combo of online dashboard software and team of experts offer a Managed Service plan that’ll have you wondering why you never made the switch in the first place.

HOW DO THINGS GO SO WRONG?

There are ways to do things, and there are better ways to do things - much better.

If your brand has a MAP policy in place - awesome, you’re in the right mindset! If you have an active enforcement process for that policy - even more awesome, you’re actually being proactive about your brand’s success.

Now, if you’re manually monitoring and enforcing your MAP, take a look at our three reasons why you should consider adopting software. Manually doing everything on your own leaves your business and brand exposed to errors, mistakes, and oversights that can damage your profit and success in the long run. When human eyes alone oversee the MAP compliance process, lots of things can go wrong.

Improper MAP monitoring

We’ve been there: going through all the major marketplaces and scouring the web for all the vendors selling your products. It’s a cumbersome, hair pulling, and repetitive task that can easily lead even the best of the best to miss sellers, overlook violations, forget to check a certain website, etc. These types of ‘small’ mistakes really aren’t small in the grander scheme of things. The sum of all missed violations equals an erosion to your brand that is difficult to get back. The hard fact here is that once the damage is done, it’s done.

You need to make sure that the individual responsible for monitoring/enforcing is an extremely detail-oriented, patient, and diligent person. Even then, when you send someone online to find MAP violations armed with only manual tools, you set them up for failure.

MAP violation consequences and poor enforcement

Okay, so let’s say that you’ve identified all the MAP violations out there for your brand. (This is the stuff dreams are made of when doing things manually).

The next step is contacting and notifying these sellers of their incorrect pricing. However, this isn’t a simple feat. Things get sticky with non-complying sellers and following up after you’ve checked and rechecked pricing. You need someone who is highly organized with the right contacts, reminders, and price lists all set up, who can keep track of everyone and stay up-to-date with the status of their pricing.

A few wrong moves, like contacting a seller saying they’re violating when they’re not, or providing the wrong link in an email, could rub your sellers the wrong way. It could be perceived that you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re disorganized, or your seller doesn’t deserve your full attention.

Lack of quality business data

Alright, we’ve established that monitoring and enforcing takes boatloads of time. You, or whoever’s responsible, is mainly consumed by these two tasks alone. That’s dangerous because there’s a whole wealth of information under the hood of all that data you’re collecting that can help guide your business strategy.

It may not be a requirement to create reports, but reports provide you and your brand with the concrete data that allows you to derive useful facts that help lead to success in many areas of your business.

Damaged relationships

This is two-fold, but overall, it comes down to treating your customers well.

We understand that with so much time spent on monitoring and enforcement, it can be easy to see the violators as the bad guys in the equation. Many brands, and MAP monitoring services for that matter, treat violating sellers as the bad guy, using negative language that turns the whole situation into an adversarial environment. This can only make matters worse. Don’t do it.

While disorganized brands focus the majority of their time on sellers in violation, they often overlook sellers in compliance who have always followed the rules and/or accidentally fell into violation, but quickly changed their prices. These sellers need some attention too!

Don’t forget them in this process. Send individual thank you notes or recognize them in a mass broadcast - something to say, “hey, we know you’re following our MAP policy, thank you, we appreciate it.” They could feel as though you don’t care or don’t value their efforts if they’re ignored, which could harm your relationship.

Leaving your MAP compliance process to be managed manually creates a lack of consistency, eats up time and resources, and leaves your brand with an incomplete picture of how your brand fits into the online retail landscape.

DO MAP THE RIGHT WAY WITH TRADE VITALITY’S MANAGED SERVICE

The experience Trade Vitality brings to market puts us in a unique position to understand the trials and tribulations of manual MAP monitoring and enforcement from both the brand and retailer perspective. It’s the core to why our software exists today.

While the center piece of our service is the online dashboard software that allows brands to use our technology to eliminate mundane tasks associated with managing MAP, we saw the clear need for our Managed Service plan for those who seek to ‘set it and forget it.’

Our Managed Service fills a gap in expertise: we combine our high-tech online dashboard with a dedicated account manager that has the experience and knowledge to properly enforce a brand’s MAP policy. We take care of 99% of the work for you.

Each brand is assigned an account manager that is there every step of the way, from strategizing the most effective process for your business, to setting up your dashboard, to contacting your sellers -- we’re always there. You decide how you want your violations managed, and your manager monitors the pulse of your MAP policy and keeps it healthy. This, combined with their unparalleled expertise in the field, allows your manager to effectively manage your account on your behalf.

Based on criteria that a brand sets, the account manager contacts all sellers in violation. That means all initial warnings and follow up emails are sent by us, not you. You don’t have to worry about setting up any reminders and keeping track of who and when they were contacted. Sellers are sent the right information that they need to comply to your MAP pricing, including violation date, price, source, and screenshots.

Each week, your TV team member provides you with a report on your violators and overall statistics relating to your MAP policy with weekly changes. For instance, the number of people in violation, the number of people contacted, the number of searches run, etc. Phew! You don’t need to look under the hood yourself, we take care of organizing and displaying that data to you in an easily digestible and actionable way. Certain numbers not as helpful? You can always customize the report to see what you want so you can make the decisions that you need for your business and its success.

Most importantly, your account manager understands the impact of the customer experience on your brand. Delivering the utmost in quality service is a must. We don’t just mean with the brands using Trade Vitality, we’re talking about YOUR customers. Almost think of our team as being hardwired to create, build, and maintain relationships -- success isn’t based on one person, team, or company alone. With this in mind, all of our interactions with your customers, or your sellers, will always be with the intention of keeping the relationship in tact and/or making it better -- we become an extension of your team. It’s about creating a relationship between a brand and their seller, so they can ultimately be successful in the long-term. That means, we don’t see your violators as the enemy and treat them as such, and we ensure that your complying sellers stay happy.

With our Managed Service plan, your brand can be confident that they’ll see consistency in their MAP management process, which is key to success. They’ll have a complete picture of their business in relation to MAP with easily digestible and actionable steps. We’re happy to take the wheel and save you about 99% of the work. We’ve got you.

CONCLUSION

With Trade Vitality’s Managed Service plan, we deliver all the key components to enforce your MAP policy. We’re all too aware of the damage that may impact a brand’s success if a proper process isn’t in place, and this often happens when brands choose to manually monitor and enforce.

Managed Service provides consistency that’s close to impossible compared with doing things on your own. It bolsters confidence in your seller network through proper monitoring with the right notifications going to the right people.

We encourage you to seek out information and techniques that help guide your brand’s business strategy rather than just fighting to survive. Get in touch. We can help.

Fill out the contact form on our homepage or call 1-800-801-0536