A year of rising inflation, electoral uncertainty, and a consumer that doesn't forgive mistakes. Here's how to win at the point of sale.

2026 has arrived in full force: minimum wage up 23.7%, inflation projected between 6% and 6.5% per the Banco de la República, May elections, and a consumer who compares, cuts back, and switches brands without thinking twice. In this context, point-of-sale execution is no longer a "continuous improvement" topic — it's where the year is won or lost.

The good news is that today you don't need an army of people walking stores to know what's happening. Prices and availability at digital retailers are a reliable reflection of what's happening on the physical shelf, and collecting that information digitally gives you speed and cost-efficiency that a field operation simply can't match.

Here are five concrete ways to improve execution this year.

1. Monitor prices every day, not every week

In an environment where costs rise from minimum-wage increases and retailers adjust prices constantly, checking prices weekly is showing up late. A retailer can move your price on a Tuesday and by Friday you've lost rotation without knowing it.

Daily monitoring lets you detect deviations the same day: someone selling below suggested retail price, a competitor that adjusted before you, or a channel where your product fell out of range. With that information you can act in hours, not weeks.

Key insight: collecting these prices from the digital channel is much faster and cheaper than sending field reps to verify in-store — and online prices reflect the physical shelf reality with reasonable accuracy.

2. Verify your promotions actually executed

Negotiating a promotion with a retailer is only half the work. The other half is verifying that it activated on the right date, at the right price, and that it deactivated when it should. In a year where every peso of trade investment has to deliver more, assuming promotions executed well is a risk not worth taking.

Digital monitoring of promotions gives you concrete evidence: what's active, where, since when, and at what price. It also shows you what the competition is doing, so you can react fast if someone launches a counter-offer that neutralizes your strategy.

3. Detect stockouts before they accumulate days of lost sales

Every hour your product shows as "out of stock" at a retailer is a sale that went to the competition. And in 2026, with consumers willing to switch brands for price, recovering that shopper is much harder than retaining them.

Stockouts tend to worsen during price-adjustment periods: retailers adjust inventories, negotiations get tense, and your product disappears just when you most need to be present. Detecting stockouts in real time — without waiting for a rep to walk by the store — lets you escalate the issue with the retailer the same day.

4. Use digital data as a proxy for what's happening in-store

This is an important mindset shift. Many companies still believe the only way to know what's happening at point of sale is to visit it. And yes, visits are valuable. But they don't scale, they aren't daily, and they're costly.

The prices, promotions, and availability published on digital retailer sites are a very reliable indicator of what's happening in the physical store. Most major retailers in Colombia run unified or very similar prices between their digital and physical channels. Monitoring the digital channel gives you 100% retailer coverage, every day, without dispatching anyone.

Does that mean you fully replace the field team? No. It means your field team arrives at the store knowing exactly what to look for, instead of doing a general check. That's efficiency.

5. Bring data to the negotiation table, not assumptions

In a year where retailers are also under cost and margin pressure, commercial meetings will be more tense than usual. Walking in with concrete data — suggested-price compliance, agreed-promo execution, per-SKU stockout levels — completely changes the dynamic of the conversation.

A Key Account Manager who can show that a retailer had their product out of stock for 12 days last month, or that a promotion activated 3 days late, has real arguments to negotiate. One who arrives with general perceptions has a much harder conversation.

The context isn't going to wait

With inflationary pressure from minimum wage, a consumer migrating to private labels and hard discount, and the uncertainty of an election year, CPG companies in Colombia need to execute better with less margin for error.

The technology to do it already exists. Platforms like ePerfectStore.com automatically and daily collect price, promotion, and availability data from every digital retailer in Colombia and LATAM, and turn it into actionable alerts for Revenue Management, Trade Marketing, E-commerce, and Sales teams.

It isn't about having more data. It's about having the right data, every day, to make better decisions faster.

Sources

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