At UpClear’s November 2025 RGM Summit, Commercial and Revenue Growth Management (RGM) leaders from leading FMCG brands gathered to discuss pain points, trends, and best practices in the industry.
Alongside a line-up of expert speakers and roundtables, UpClear Deployment Director Raghu Raghavan hosted a panel to explore one of the most persistent challenges for global and multi-national firms in Revenue Growth Management: how to balance global consistency with local specifics and relevance. The panel featured two long-tenured industry practitioners: Maria Šenk, Senior Global Promo & Trade Investment Manager at Perfetti Van Melle, and Xavery Yurek, TPM Lead at Kimberly-Clark.
During the discussion, both participants aligned on a clear principle: global RGM should define the vision, standards, and guardrails, while local and regional teams must own the change process, execution and value delivery. All parties should be working in partnership with a continuous learning loop for the organisation on their RGM journey.
One of the key responsibilities of a global function is to set non-negotiables across local teams. Although it’s important to be adaptable to local markets, Xavery posited that when local teams operate too independently, TPM can become the “Wild West.”
“I think there needs to be quite a lot of strong governance and policing,” he said. “If we’re having to support six different platforms across 15 different markets, it’s just going to be chaotic.”
Establishing global guidelines is essential to maintaining a sense of order and creating a common path. However, what that list includes may vary by company and the markets they operate within.
Maria shared how the global team at Perfetti Van Melle is responsible for setting strategy, framework, and securing investment to build regional and local structures and resources. This includes:
Regardless of the guidance that global sets, what matters is that the messaging is consistent with the rest of the organisation.
“It’s all about finding a balance,” Xavery said. “If you really want to be able to get to the point where people are using tools consistently, adhering to the process, then I think there really needs to be a very stable and very consistent support spine across the regions globally.”
Global RGM frameworks and deployments can look successful centrally but fail to gain traction locally, especially when it comes to tool deployment and execution. The panelists shared their experiences and takeaways from this phenomenon. “One of our main learnings is very hard to have one solution that fits all,” Maria said.
She talked about how teams can set expectations around global projects. “Whenever you do a global rollout, I don’t think we should ever think it’s like a switch that will just bring the change right away or bring all the markets to the same place, because that’s not possible,” Maria said. “It should be looked at as the journey of maturity.”
This realization is a bit of a shift from the previous global template, in which companies launched top-down initiatives, rolling out plans to 20 markets at a time. Now, brands are increasingly recognizing the nuances within each market.
For that reason, Perfetti has adopted an approach that uses the 80/20 principle when it comes to standardization. “You go with your top market, that brings the biggest part of your value… And then if you have the single source of truth for that, that’s already quite a lot for your business and brings a lot of scalability to what you do,” Maria said.
Both panelists emphasized the value of locally driven strategy and execution.
“From a global perspective, you just don’t really have the capability to get into and understand the dynamics of the market,” said Xavery. “And I think that’s where the true value comes in, really partnering with the market, understanding what the pain points are, understanding what the availability is, how the retailers behave.”
At Kimberly-Clark, once the team has proven a success case, they begin to scale it gradually to more markets. The concern is that moving to expand too quickly could result in “really diluting the value because it’s not hitting the sweet spot… individual needs and pain points in individual markets.”
However, these efforts still rely on the global function to set central frameworks and guidelines around implementation. “Where we see the biggest value of the global work that we’ve done is basically setting those RGM pillars, determining what the playbook is, and then within that also defining what those KPIs are,” Xavery said.”
As global standardization starts to look increasingly impractical, some brands are adopting an “archetype” structure to scale more sustainably. In other words, they’re moving from a universally global model to defining characteristic-based groups within the global market.
Maria talked about how they’re implementing this at Perfetti. “We still try to have the global consistency and global processes, but then there is adaptability based on archetypes,” she said.
These groupings can be shaped by:
However, as with any top-down approach, it’s important to be prepared for new complexities to arise you put archetypes into practice. Xavery expressed frustration with trying to implement it in organisation.
“I’ve struggled with the definition of archetypes,” he said. “Once you actually get to the reality of implementing this stuff, then you see that archetype, some of the assumptions around the archetype, some of the rules and some of the common processes, they start to fall apart once you actually get into the detail of the local market.”
In the end, it comes down to setting the right expectations internally and being ready to adjust as new challenges come up.
Both speakers agreed that a fully global single source of truth is extremely difficult to achieve. Instead, the recommended approach is:
Xavery highlighted one practical tactic Kimberly-Clark uses to enable comparability without forcing uniformity:
“We know that we can’t really dictate how pricing waterfall looks like in the market, because it’s very much determined by local retailers anyway. We’re making sure that we’re capturing all the spend at the most granular level of detail.
And then separately, we’ve launched a commercial policy foundation within our organisation, where it basically decomposed all the different trades and then classified: Is it working, non-working, contractual, business building, whatever else?
Then essentially, we’re taking all that transactional data and then we’re remapping it into a singular view of what trade terms look like and what our commercial policy looks like, what commercial structures look like.”
This strategy has enabled them to easily compare profit pools and how trade varies across customers—a win they can begin to roll out across the region.
Even when an initiative calls for a global rollout, getting it implemented on a local level requires strategy. Rather than getting local teams to check a box based on your new initiative, how do you convince them that there’s value in the principle you’re rolling out?
The panel shared some wisdom when it comes to change management:
Maria also highlighted the importance of taking small steps and setting your expectations accordingly. “We cannot come and say we want to change everything or to change as many things as one. We need to do it step by step. And usually, those steps are smaller and it is going slower than we would like,” she said.
The panel concluded that the future of RGM lies in the middle: Global continuing to bring clarity with local market ownership and value delivery. “The global should always learn from the local market, and we should see what they’re doing,” said Maria. “It should be a continuous loop, and not a hierarchy.”
They also offered predictions including:
Ultimately, success will come from global clarity and local execution, supported by continuous feedback between markets and the global RGM function.
At UpClear, our mission is to empower Consumer Goods brands to maximize revenue performance and trade investment returns through intelligent, collaborative software—providing a single source of truth, streamlined automation, and actionable insights.
BluePlanner Revenue Management software supports end-to-end processes, from Annual Operating Planning to Account Planning and Execution.
