Trade spend is one of the largest line items on a manufacturer's P&L, yet for many organizations it remains one of the least controlled. When data lives across spreadsheets and disconnected systems, and teams rarely share the same view of the same numbers, confident decision-making becomes nearly impossible. The cost of that uncertainty is not theoretical. It compounds quietly over time as margin erosion that gets accepted as an unavoidable cost of doing business.

It doesn't have to be that way.

In a recent conversation with Dean Rallo, iTradeNetwork’s subject matter expert who has spent years working inside the complexities of trade spend management, he explored what it takes to build a program that performs rather than one that simply exists. The framework: Identify, Prevent and Reclaim is not a checklist, but a way of operating. Three disciplines that, when working together, move an organization from reacting to problems after the fact to getting ahead of them.

The Starting Point: What Does "Well-Structured" Mean?

When asked what a well-structured trade spend program looks like in practice, Dean's answer cut past the operational details most people lead with. Before process, before technology, he started with purpose.

"The team works hard to set up these trade spend programs," he said. "Their purpose is to help drive growth and volume. They're just so important in the way the food-away-from-home industry works. It's a large expense - you budget for it, you spend the money. A well-structured program will allow you to maximize that money and really benefit from the work and energy you put into setting up these programs."

Building something well requires being willing to look honestly at where the current program falls short, and the most common failure points tend to be hiding in plain sight.

Identify: What You Don't Know Is What's Hurting You

Visibility sounds straightforward until you try to achieve it at scale. Dean is direct about where the biggest blind spots tend to live: "The biggest blind spot that's out there today is not having a foundation of a solid trade spend program in place. You need to have a plan as well as a process."

What makes that harder than it sounds is the nature of the data itself. Claim files are massive, arriving daily or monthly from operator partners and distributors, with line items truncated and product names that don't align across sources. Agreements sit in one place, claims in another, and connecting them manually is, as Dean put it, "nearly impossible." The result is a process that consumes enormous time just making sense of the data, with little bandwidth left to act on it.

Dean draws a clear distinction between processing claims for the sake of payment and processing them for the sake of insight. "Why do we process these claims? Well, the obvious reason is that you want to get the claim paid. But if that's the only reason you're processing claims, I'm going to say you're missing out." Finance needs the data to reconcile. Sales needs it to make decisions in the field. When it doesn't reach both sides in near real-time, the organization captures only a fraction of the value the process could deliver.

On timing specifically, Dean sets a concrete benchmark: "If you can process claims within five days and get that cleansed data back to the field, that's a really good result. If it's taking 60, 90 days or longer, the team runs the risk of making decisions on outdated information." That lag is where margin risk accumulates through the steady drift of decisions made without a complete picture.

Prevent: Stopping the Bleeding Before It Starts

Seeing the problem clearly is only half the equation. The harder discipline is building the structure to intervene before money leaves the building.

Stop Paying First and Asking Questions Later

The barriers to pre-payment validation are rarely a single issue. Dean describes the challenge as spanning process, data, and systems simultaneously, with timing adding pressure at every turn: "Many of these payments are due on net 10, but you haven't had time to process them. You want to meet your contractual obligation and pay the claim, then you go back afterward to reconcile." With deductions, the situation is even more difficult to unwind. By the time the invoice arrives, the money has already been withheld by the customer.

The cumulative effect is an organization in a permanent state of catch-up, reviewing transactions that have already closed rather than applying judgment while there is still an opportunity to act.

Organizational alignment makes this more complicated. Sales and finance teams often approach the same data with different priorities, and Dean is deliberate about the language he uses to describe the gap: "'Enforcing' is a strong word. We need to understand the contract terms." Most companies genuinely want alignment, but when reconciliation cycles stretch to 90 days, the shared context required to act on contract terms has long since faded.

What strong contract health enables, though, goes well beyond compliance. Dean points to a pattern that frequently goes unnoticed: "What happens if no one ever claims on that contract? You realize you have a percentage of contracts that were budgeted for but never used. That provides insight for the sales team to call those customers and see how we can improve the deal." A well-managed process generates intelligence that a sales team can use to deepen customer relationships and improve the quality of future agreements.

Reclaim: Recovering What's Already Gone

Even the most disciplined programs will have some degree of leakage. The measure of a mature organization is how systematically it pursues recovery and how intelligently it applies what it finds.

Dean approaches this pillar with care: "It's a delicate topic. It would be great to say every time we find an invalid rate, our customers go out and reclaim it. But there's a business relationship to consider. These are some of your biggest customers." Recovery is a business decision, and the role of a well-structured program is to make that decision as clear and defensible as possible.

What prevents full recovery, more often than anything else, is the absence of documentation at the moment it matters most. "You have to find it first," Dean notes. "Then you have to have the supporting documents to go back in a well-structured format, citing the claim number, where it was double-claimed, and what the agreement said." Without that evidentiary foundation, even legitimate disputes are difficult to sustain through a customer's deduction portal or finance team.

The financial case for closing the gap is hard to ignore. Dean frames it plainly: "If you realize your program is costing you 8% when you budgeted 5%, and you bring it back to 5%, you now have 3% to reinvest in new partners or new initiatives." For manufacturers running significant trade budgets, that recovered margin requires no new customers, no new products, and no new distribution. It represents dollars already earned but not yet collected.

Beyond the financial return, Dean points to something that gets less attention but matters just as much: "Instead of spending time in huge spreadsheets trying to normalize data, the team can focus on their core job: analyzing and growing the business." When recovery becomes more efficient, it returns capacity to the people doing the work, freeing them to contribute at a level that spreadsheet management never allows.

The Shift That Makes It All Work

What ties these three pillars together is not a platform or a tool, though both play a supporting role. It is a fundamental change in how an organization thinks about trade spend, moving from a posture of acceptance to one of accountability.

Progress starts with an honest look at where visibility breaks down, where control is absent, and where recovery efforts are falling short. That kind of candid assessment, done without defensiveness, tends to be the clearest path to building something worth having.

The Identify, Prevent, Reclaim framework is not a checklist to complete. It is a discipline to build, and for the organizations that commit to it, it tends to change not just what they recover but how they think about trade spend from the ground up.

Take the First Step

Building that discipline starts with knowing where you stand. iTradeNetwork has spent more than 25 years working across the food and beverage supply chain with some of the largest manufacturers, distributors, and GPOs in the industry, and that experience informs every conversation we have about trade spend performance.

A complimentary Trade Spend Health Diagnostic (six questions that take less than a minute) can quickly surface where visibility, control, or recovery may be working against you. For organizations ready to go deeper, an ROI Recovery Session pairs you directly with a trade spend expert to examine your specific exposure across rebate overpayments and invalid claims, and to put numbers around what recovery could mean for your business.

The framework is only as valuable as the action it inspires. This is where that action begins.