Enhancing the Food and Floral Supply Chain
Verdant Technologies (Verdant) remains focused on changing the benchmark for freshness and sustainability from farm to table. This cultivates their commitment to providing consumers with high-quality, environmentally friendly products in the food and floral supply chains. Additionally, their solutions create new opportunities and expand markets while using fewer natural resources and reducing negative environmental impacts.
Verdant engaged Cherry Bekaert to be their reliable strategic partner to determine a go-to-market pricing strategy to launch their innovative solution. Through a trusted, mutual relationship, it was beneficial that Gordon Robertson, Chief Executive Officer at Verdant Technologies, met with Francesco Fazio, Partner, Strategic Growth & Innovation at Cherry Bekaert. They started with initial conference calls, followed by interviews with Francesco and other team members of Cherry Bekaert. From there, Verdant got into the business to establish their goals and objectives. This was then followed by questions like, how does Verdant bring this idea to market? What are some key needs to see in the business?
Supply Chain Challenges
Verdant faced roadblocks around their pricing strategy which prevented them from maximizing profitability, particularly with their execution strategy with their customers in the marketplace. By emphasizing the significance of sustainability as it remains essential to their target audience, this set the ground for discussion and framework moving forward.
After they tried to work with other vendors and in-house, they still were not reaching their growth potential. Their business evolved from a technology-based company, born around scientists with grandiose ideas, to a commercialized business that makes an impact. Now more than ever, they had to think more creatively to produce unique solutions and go-to-market with their ideas in an incredibly strategic manner. That is when they called upon Cherry Bekaert’s Strategic Growth & Innovation team, which led to challenging their assumptions and solidifying their ideas to instill more confidence in a sales organization that frankly did not exist beforehand.
“Cherry Bekaert digs deeper and works alongside you to get something truly valuable out of the relationship.”
— Gordon Robertson | CEO at Verdant Technologies
Strategic Transformation at Work
In the initial step of Verdant’s pricing strategy and execution, Cherry Bekaert’s team performed a thorough assessment of their needs and constraints. As a result, Verdant can further administer and have governance in place throughout their sales team, organization and customers.
“We are building a global platform of thinking—the last thing we want to be is commoditized. So, we must think through everything very thoroughly. How do we price?How do we differentiate? What do we think about the pricing model? These are precisely the types of questions that Cherry Bekaert excels at solving through creative thinking,” stated Gordon Robertson.
Centralizing Pricing and Supply Chain Demand
Shortly after Verdant’s project initiation phase, our Cherry Bekaert team engaged with their Chief Revenue Officer and Director of Product Development to implement a value-based approach to their pricing model ready for the marketplace.
“Several team members have been part of the process, on the pricing side, and the feedback has all been positive,” stated Gordon. Gordon also indicated that the Cherry Bekaert team is incredibly open to involving outside resources and employees to the project. “Their openness to engage with our team and anyone we brought onto the project, along with the depth of the analytics, made this process valuable to us.”
“Cherry Bekaert is very detail oriented, has deep analytics capabilities, and has a genuine desire to precisely understand that we’re doing, how we do it, and where we do it. We even took the Cherry Bekaert team to our packing house to show how products move through our system. Understanding this is imperative in creating a viable solution or strategy for what we’re looking to bring to the marketplace.”
— Gordon Robertson | CEO at Verdant Technologies
Business Intelligence Enabling Insights to Drive Business Decisions
Like many entities involved in supply chain distribution and working with limited resources, efficiency of processes is key to enabling them to focus on their customers and increase revenue opportunities to scale their business. By further automating and eliminating obstacles in their current processes, Verdant has been able to increase efficiencies across their operations and remain resilient.
Verdant needed guidance to improve their dashboards and reports across sales, operations and finance to drive decision-making through accurate and timely reporting. As a result of these valuable insights put into practice, they are more efficient in simplifying complex data and ideas and presenting information in digestible, easy-to-understand manner.
“As we near the end of our engagement, this is not the end of our relationship with Cherry Bekaert —we will look for a new way for our relationship to evolve. We have plenty of work ahead of us; we just have to figure out where Cherry Bekaert fits into that so we can work together again in the future.”
— Gordon Robertson | CEO at Verdant Technologies
How Cherry Bekaert Can Help
Our Cherry Bekaert Strategic Growth & Innovation consulting team is comprised of strategists and consultants that help organizations see market trends before the competition to anticipate the needs of customers and take advantage of new untapped growth opportunities. Our professionals develop unique strategies and innovation processes to create sustainable, industry-breaking profitable growth.
Leveraging our strategic process, we help digitally-enabled organizations, especially middle-market companies, do more with less. Cherry Bekaert stays on top of the latest technology trends, but we know that technology is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We are here to guide you on what technology makes sense to adopt as it pertains to delivering the highest value to your organization.
