Coming out of a summer of building hand in hand with our customers, it felt like a good time to bring everyone here up to speed on how SnoBase continues to evolve.
If you last checked in when we were talking about inventory health or retailer forms, there’s quite a bit to catch up on.
We’ve been obsessing about ways to take more of the day-to-day sales operations work off your plate, from managing category reviews to getting broker commission statements out the door.
Our growth has accelerated along the way, helped by fractional sales teams signing on and bringing the brands they support into SnoBase.
We’re now closing in on 100 brands, an important milestone!
That growing community is shaping what we build. More brands and more teams bring more of the thorny problems that deserve a better answer than yet another spreadsheet.
Taking on the work itself
Some of our most useful recent work has been in building AI agents for specific sales operations tasks, powered by the operating data already in SnoBase.
One example:
Broker commissions: Calculate commissions, create commission statements, and produce the full supporting reports. The output includes the backup needed to understand how the numbers were calculated.
Broker networks often overlap distributor customers. This means paying them commission requires backing out sales to excluded retailers/channels, identifying deductions that can be excluded from commissionable sales, and preparing the backup necessary to inform the broker where the numbers came from.
This is a substantial task often consuming finance, sales, and executive team hours.
Having the underlying information organized in SnoBase, and experts on the team who have lived this work for years, has let us develop agents that automate the full task, from the data through to a usable deliverable. All with an expert in the loop to define the terms and check the work before it goes out the door.
We’re deploying more agents, for promotional analysis and other discreet sales ops work, as our brand partners continue to bring us the issues causing too much noise and taking up too much of their week.
It is no longer just about what SnoBase enables you to do. It is now about what SnoBase can handle for you. A meaningful, energizing shift in our value prop.
Category reviews are now a part of SnoBase
Bringing Category Reviews into SnoBase was something we always wanted to do.
We decided the best place to start was to allow brands and brokers to add their review calendars directly into the app, then select which reviews to track.
SnoBase’s AI makes recommendations of the right reviews for your products. One click to track them on your master category review tracker.
Category Review dates notoriously change, so in allowing users to continuously add their updates and new versioned calendars as they get them, we believe this offers the best way to keep your brand(s) current in review tracking.
We’re also overhauling promotions
Too often trade spend is viewed as weapon used against brands rather than the strongest bow in their quiver to drive consumer demand.
We believe this is really a story about perception of control. If you ask anyone involved in promotional planning today, and we’ve been talking to a lot of them, this out of control feeling is driven by communication confusion and time constraints. So, we’re attacking both.
We are now capturing a lot more detail about promotions (from the consumer offer, to the buy periods, to the funding mechanisms) to enable deeper performance analysis, automatically fill out more of retailer’s promotional forms, and share these details across the team.
Simply drag and drop your 2027 promo planner and viola!
This also provides critical, organized context for our agents to spot retailers who are not yet getting a customized promotional plan and retailers who are getting cookie-cutter deals that we can suggest improvements. Finally, it provides the basis for robust, automated post-promotional analysis.
A promotional calendar should help you make deliberate decisions about where, when, and how to support your products. It should be something you can evaluate and improve as your business changes.
We’re kicking this off by offering an audit of your 2027 promotional program absolutely FREE!
The foundation matters more than ever
All of this builds on the work SnoBase was already helping brands manage: understanding inventory health by SKU and distribution center, identifying potential stock-outs and excess inventory, planning replenishment, and managing distributor orders with better context.
It also builds on SnoBase’s retailer relationship management, with account information, submission history, and support for completing retailer forms using all of the data you’ve added to SnoBase.
Bringing it all together in the Retailer Relationship Manager
Whether you’re on this list as a service provider partner, an investor, a current user, or a broker or a brand, I’d love to connect about what we’ve built, where we’re headed, and the sales operations problems you’d most like help solving.
Thank you for reading,
The SnoBase Team