Colgate-Palmolive’s Surabhi Pokhriyal on Flattening the Funnel and How to Avoid SUMO

In ecommerce, the rules of the traditional sales funnel no longer apply. That’s why CPG brands must make the maximum Return on Effort (ROE) for everything they do, from creative campaigns to the brand’s digital platform, says Surabhi Pokhriyal, global head of digital commerce for Colgate-Palmolive.

In this podcast, Pokhriyal sits down with Jason Nyhus, SVP of sales and partnerships at Digital River to discuss the challenges and opportunities for CPG brands in the current ecommerce landscape.

CPG ecommerce strategy The age-old concept of a funnel where marketing owns the top and sales owns the bottom collapses in the ecommerce space where consumers search for a product and have a micro moment of engagement with a brand before purchasing. That means sales and marketing must be in lock-step to catch the consumer at that brief moment of engagement.

“The consumer in a very digitally invasive way has decided that the funnel doesn’t exist anymore,” says Pokhriyal in her discussion on channel conflict at 6:32. “You just want to be able to catch the consumer wherever they are in their journey.”

CPG ecommerce challenges Brands are always looking to create closer relationships with consumers, and CPG brands are no exception. Historically, however, CPG brands have relied on retailers as the intermediaries between the brand and their customers, and retailers haven’t always shared customer information because it’s proprietary. Depending on category, having a direct to consumer (D2Cchannel that incorporates education with sales can help CPG brands bridge that gap, says Pokhriyal.

“You may or may not use the brand website as a direct-to-consumer site,” Pokhriyal says in her discussion on CPG categories at 14:36 “But you may put in plug-ins like where to buy to make sure if somebody landed on my site and they are inspired by what they see about my product, they have the option to go buy my product in the most seamless and frictionless kind of way.”

Don’t miss out Pokhriyal has an acronym for companies that drag their feet and don’t embrace the latest thinking on ecommerce: SUMO, which stands for Straight Up Missing Out. It’s a play on FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. These companies need to understand—especially post-COVID—that they’ll need a new playbook to get them where they want to go. “All the things that worked so far in a pre-COVID era is not what’s going to work to excel in digital commerce today,” Pokhriyal says in her discussion of Colgate-Palmolive’s digital strategy at 5:13.