What is Trade Promotion Management?

Trade Promotion Management (TPM) is the end-to-end process by which Consumer Goods companies plan, execute, and analyze promotional campaigns in collaboration with their retail and distributor partners. These promotions—such as discounts, displays, bundles, and loyalty incentives—are designed to boost volume, secure shelf space, increase market share, and drive mutual value with customers.

A full TPM process includes setting budgets, building promotion calendars, forecasting volumes, negotiating terms, executing in-store and analyzing results. It also covers the financial side—handling claims, validating invoices and managing accruals. Because of that, TPM spans multiple departments, including Sales, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain and Revenue Management. It touches nearly every commercial function: Sales, Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain and Revenue Management. That’s what makes it powerful – and so hard to get right. 

Promotions are everywhere. Whether it’s a buy-one-get-one-free deal at the supermarket, a meal bundle with discounted drinks or a themed offer around a sporting event or national holiday, promotions are designed to influence shopper behavior. The goal might be to drive volume, shift stock, support a launch or simply get people through the door.

They’re not limited to food and beverage or the big box retailers either. Trade promotions happen in convenience stores, drugstores, specialist shops and increasingly, online. This is now an omni-channel challenge, and the pressure is rising. Retailers want more support. Consumers expect value. And manufacturers need to deliver both, without sacrificing margin.

In recent years, the terminology has also evolved. TPM is now often accompanied by TPO (Trade Promotion Optimisation) and TPX (Trade Promotion Execution), but TPM is still widely used as the umbrella term for the entire process—from planning through to post-event analysis.

At a high level, this is how trade promotion investment typically flows through a Consumer Goods organization. Marketing defines spend targets by brand. Trade Marketing then allocates that spend across customers. The goal is to connect strategic investment with shopper-facing activity — but without the right tools, visibility and agility, that process often breaks down.

TPM involves many hands. Finance sets the budget. Planners model and schedule campaigns. Sales teams bring them to life with retailers. Field reps monitor what’s happening in store. And claims teams handle the financial clean-up on the back end.

But most companies manage all of this with disconnected tools and siloed systems. Finance has their ERP. Planners rely on spreadsheets. Field reps work from separate retail execution platforms. None of these tools speak to one another.

This creates all kinds of inefficiencies:

A McKinsey study found that more than 70% of promotions are unprofitable. Other sources suggest it could be closer to 80%. To test this ourselves, we ran a series of roundtables with senior leaders across Consumer Goods in Europe and North America. The consensus was clear: the problem is real, and it’s worse than most want to admit.

Too much time is spent planning low-impact promotions. Too little insight is available to know what’s working. And most organizations are flying blind when it comes to measuring real ROI.

It’s a system-level issue—one that technology alone won’t fix unless it connects every part of the TPM process.

It can, but only if it addresses the root problems: fragmentation, lack of visibility and slow feedback loops. A successful TPM system must bring all stakeholders onto the same platform and provide a single view of promotions, from plan to performance.

This means: