IFMA’s Go2Market Edge wrapped up earlier this month in Silicon Valley. We spent three days on AI strategy, visited Google and Amazon, and traded ideas with a room full of people thinking about what comes next. We came home with plenty to think about, and these questions stuck with us:
How well connected are your sales and marketing programs to your results? When you see a lift, can you trace it back to the investment that created it?
Across the industry, we hear a version of the same answer:
“Half of them work, half of them don’t, and we don’t know which ones are the ones that worked.”
The exciting part is that this answer can change.
Why the Loop Has Stayed Open
For decades, the loop between a program and its result stayed open, because the data sat in separate systems that were not built to connect with each other. A campaign launches, a deal closes in the CRM, product ships through the distributor, and volume lands at the operator. Four systems of record, and very few ways to connect them to one another. We’ve watched manufacturers manage that gap well for a long time, reading the signals they had and making sharp calls without the one thing that would tie it all together.
That one thing kept coming up at the event, in two words: connected data. When those four moments connect, the loop closes, and that changes how a manufacturer grows.
What Connected Data Looks Like in Practice
In practice, it works like this: You run a program, then measure the lift your closed-won CRM deals delivered, at the operator level, in real de-duplicated volume. That gives you lift you can see, learn from, and invest behind, so you know your ROI, you know your gaps, and each quarter your team gets sharper about where to put its energy and investment.
From Measurement to Compounding Growth
The same holds across the industry. Manufacturers who know which half worked learn faster, invest with more confidence, and bring more value to their operators. AI builds on that foundation, because AI trained on connected data scales the learning.
That is the 10x opportunity in front of foodservice, and it is within reach.
At Tibersoft, this is the work that fuels us. We’ve been building the commercial intelligence layer that connects program to purchase, and it’s a conversation we want to keep having.
So let’s keep it going: how well connected are your loops?
