A consistent review structure can save your team from rebuilding the presentation every time. Consistency is useful when it makes the evidence and the decision easier to understand.
It does not mean every Walmart or Sam’s Club merchant expects the same ten slides. The right format depends on the brief, meeting, account, and decision. Follow any specific retailer request first.
The outline below is my starting point for a supplier account review. Use the parts that serve the discussion, and leave the rest in the working analysis or appendix.
Put the decision near the beginning
Open with what the meeting needs to resolve, your current recommendation, and any significant uncertainty. If an execution problem is central to the discussion, address it directly rather than burying it behind a standard business overview.
Then build the evidence in an order the reader can follow.
| Review section | Its job | Evidence to include when relevant |
|---|---|---|
| Decision and context | Establish the question | Agreed scope, current situation, requested decision |
| Business performance | Describe what changed | Comparable sales, units, distribution, and relevant economics |
| Investigation | Locate the issues and test explanations | Item, period, location, inventory, price, or service views |
| Product and customer role | Explain why the recommendation matters | Valid product comparisons and authorized shopper or member insight |
| Options and tradeoffs | Make the choice explicit | Costs, constraints, assumptions, alternatives, and uncertainty |
| Execution | Connect the decision to action | Responsibilities, approvals, dependencies, and follow-up |
This can be a short document, a few slides, or a longer review. The slide count is not the quality test.
Select metrics for the actual question
Choose time periods that suit the decision and show exact dates. For a seasonal item or recent launch, a standard trailing-quarter view may conceal the most relevant context.
Define location counts, item mappings, channels, units, and the treatment of returns. If you show productivity, name the denominator: sales per selling store-week is not the same measure as sales per authorized store-week or sales per unit of shelf space.
Label margin precisely and use a source that supports the stated definition. A supplier’s gross margin, a retailer markup measure, and maintained margin are not interchangeable.
Keep Walmart and Sam’s service reporting scoped to their respective programs. Include the relevant evidence, not an assumed universal SQEP or OTIF slide.
Use shopper evidence for the claim it can support
Walmart describes Scintilla Shopper Behavior as a product for basket data, shopper profiles, and behavior analysis. Those can inform a recommendation, but access and available detail must be verified for the account. Walmart Data Ventures: Shopper Behavior.
A co-purchase relationship shows association. It does not by itself establish how much sales would change if you added or removed an item. Similarly, growth after a launch is not automatically incremental growth caused by that launch.
When causal impact matters, describe the study design, comparison, assumptions, and uncertainty. In controlled experimentation, trustworthy conclusions depend on the hypothesis, metrics, assignment, and design checks. The method has to support the claim. Microsoft Research on experiment design.
If the available work is descriptive, say so and recommend the next investigation or test.
Let the weekly review provide evidence
A recurring account read can maintain the same metric definitions, issue log, and action history the larger review needs. Refresh it using the sources and cadence appropriate to the business.
Keep the underlying report, source timestamp, filters, and any corrections available. A presentation is a dated interpretation of that evidence, not a reason to freeze a number that later proves wrong.
Assign owners by the question they are qualified to answer. An analyst can integrate the material while operations, quality, finance, and the account lead remain responsible for their contributions.
End with a usable record
For each proposed action, state who would own it, what approval is needed, its dependencies, and how the team would check progress. After the meeting, distinguish agreed commitments from ideas still under review.
A well-structured deck helps communicate. The work continues in the decisions, reporting, and follow-through around the account.
For the reporting-access question behind the deck, read Retail Reason’s Scintilla Basic and Charter guide. It explains the tier distinction; your account’s actual permissions determine which evidence you can use.
Start with the one-page decision plan or improve the source definitions behind your review. Retail Reason Intelligence supports retail operating questions; Startup Success Lab provides hands-on help with the awarded business.