Speed & Precision in Food Away from Home Execution

Angela Cummings – Client Success Manager, Tibersoft

Our theme at Navigators 2025 was “how to be an expert in the moment.”
This webinar addresses one of the core requirements of being that expert: speed and precision. You need to be able to quickly and effectively respond to a customer’s needs, questions, or challenges in real time. It’s about assessing a situation quickly and offering a tailored solution.

Hi, I’m Angela, a Client Success Manager at Tibersoft. My goal is to help you be that expert in the moment. So let’s talk about what that takes.

Customers today expect quick, accurate, and tailored solutions.
Being proactive—not just reactive—shows your expertise. You need to confidently present information, answer tough questions, and discuss clear options. Every client situation is unique. Whether it’s a large-scale operation or a smaller niche request, your ability to act with speed and precision helps you stand out. Speed impacts customer satisfaction and revenue. Precision ensures you’re in the right place with the right product at the right time.

But being an expert in the moment isn’t easy—especially in food away from home.
Our industry is incredibly complex, with far more players than retail. Each has shifting priorities and problems. Our teams must be knowledgeable across product lines and categories, and trade programs are significantly more complicated. Multiple valid trade payments can hit a single case: to distributors, redistributors, GPOs, operators.

And our data? It’s just as complex. We lack shared standards and formats. With so many sources and applications, it’s tough to know which tool to use for which task. That confusion can lead to frustration, poor adoption, or even the wrong answers to key business questions.

One big challenge is data latency.
Trade claims—critical data for contracted business—can arrive weeks or months after the product is purchased. That forces a tough decision: act now with incomplete data, or wait too long and miss the window. That’s not a great setup for anyone trying to be an expert in the moment.

So what’s the solution?
As always: people, process, and technology. To paraphrase Chris Hart from a recent podcast, data alone doesn’t give you insights. You need a 50-50 blend of smart data and experienced foodservice professionals.

Your organizations are full of talented people. The question is: are you empowering them with the right tools for the task?

Productivity starts with giving teams the tools they’ll actually use.
Field sales needs turnkey solutions that are still flexible enough to support different customer needs. Customizable dashboards are a great example—if they need to filter by brand or category, they can. Our four-quadrant dashboard does just that: the layout is fixed for speed, but it supports multiple ways to view performance.

Another key enabler? One source of truth.
Everyone should be aligned on success metrics like penetration, velocity, and days outstanding. If two people run the same analysis and get different results, trust in the data erodes—and that leads to misalignment and poor decisions. Aligning on reporting and goal measurement ensures teams are focused and informed.

Some of our clients are loading budgets into Explore Pro and My Insights, so they can track performance against plan in real time and make timely course corrections.

You don’t have to do all the heavy lifting alone.
Leverage your internal and external partners—Tibersoft CSMs for ad hoc analysis, the Optrade community for best practices, your IT team, your vendors. And always ask: Are we getting the most out of the systems and people already available to us?

Create a strong feedback loop.
Feedback should flow between managers and team members. Ask teams what’s working. Are tools usable? Are there gaps? Share wins. Coach through misses. This kind of loop leads to stronger processes and ongoing learning.

Don’t let inefficiency hold back your top performers.
By refining and automating where possible, you free up your teams to focus on high-value work. This is where frameworks like Jobs to Be Done are helpful. They bring clarity and structure to processes like call planning, business reviews, and annual account evaluation.

Example: You want to validate your book of business and prioritize opportunities.
What KPIs are you using? Do you have enough people assigned to high-value accounts? Are your metrics actionable—clear enough to guide focus, but not so detailed they bog people down?

At Tibersoft, we also believe in the power of ongoing training. Even simple tools benefit from refreshers. Training helps adoption, sharpens usage, and reinforces those feedback loops.

Streamline communication and automate routine tasks.
Use branded reports so everyone’s aligned visually. Ask yourself: What can we centralize or consolidate? Too many tools and data sources lead to decision fatigue.

For example, integrate claims data directly into your CRM—or vice versa. Bring in external datasets like hospital, college, or lodging group data. Build dashboards with all relevant metrics in one place. A single source of truth goes a long way toward speed and accuracy.

Other industries are already doing this. Why not us?
Retail is miles ahead in using predictive analytics, AI, and data consolidation to drive customer experience and operational efficiency. The same tools can—and should—be used in food away from home.

Chris Hart talked about our upcoming Apples to Apples concept, which will let us forecast claims using AI and speed up reporting. Instead of waiting months to assess performance, we’ll be able to do it within 30 days of quarter-end.

As you think about where to start, keep this in mind:
This is continuous improvement. It’s not one and done. You don’t need to solve everything today—just pick one or two things that can show quick results and build momentum.

Here are some great starting points:

• Prioritize your book of business plus opportunities
• Integrate CRM and reporting tools for one-stop insights
• Collaborate to reduce industry-wide data latency
• Use AI forecasting to close visibility gaps
• Build repeatable Jobs to Be Done playbooks
• Schedule ongoing training
• Track KPIs with accessible, self-service dashboards
• Create and maintain feedback loops

Thank you for attending and thank you for doing the work.
Let’s continue building the systems, tools, and processes that help us all show up better—right when it matters most.