Not every store deserves equal time on your route. If you're splitting calls evenly across your territory, you're almost certainly overspending on underperformers and leaving velocity on the table at your best doors.
Store-level sales data changes that equation — but only if you know what to pull, how to interpret it, and how to act on it before your competitor does.
The Data You Should Be Working With
For CPG brands selling through Ontario retail, the starting point is your own point-of-sale velocity by door. If you're in alcohol, the LCBO's Sale of Data (SOD) program gives trade partners access to SKU-level sales and inventory data — your own sales data is provided at no cost, and competitor data is a paid subscription. The LCBO also publishes annual per-store sales targets for all regularly listed products, with compliance assessments against those targets beginning June 2025 for FY25-26. If your SKU is underperforming against target in a given store, that's not just a ranging risk — it's a call priority signal.
For cannabis brands, the OCS releases store-level wholesale data through its annual Ontario Cannabis Marketplace: By the Numbers report. The 2025 edition gives licensed producers a transparent view of which authorized retailers are actually moving product. That's exactly the input your territory plan should be built on.
If you're in grocery or convenience, the channel just got more complex: AGCO amendments effective January 1, 2026 allow licensed grocery and convenience stores to advertise and sell alcohol online alongside other products. That means you now have doors with meaningfully different online versus in-store velocity profiles — and you need data to rank them accurately.
Tier Your Accounts Before You Build Your Route
Once you have store-level velocity data, the job is tiering — not just sorting by revenue, but by opportunity.
A high-revenue account that's already at full distribution and strong facings doesn't need a weekly visit. A mid-revenue account with a consistent out-of-stock pattern, a new set coming, or an underperforming competitor SKU next to yours? That's where showing up matters.
Build three buckets:
- Defend: High velocity, strong compliance. Visit to maintain, not to build.
- Grow: Solid velocity but gaps in distribution, facings, or secondary placement. These are your highest-ROI calls.
- Assess: Low velocity. Decide quickly whether it's a store problem, a rep execution problem, or a ranging problem — then act or deprioritize.
This tiering should be reviewed monthly, not quarterly. Shelf priorities shift. The LCBO's Q3 FY25-26 data showed US spirits removal cost roughly CA$100M in sales, which immediately elevated Canadian domestic brands at the store level — Crown Royal, JP Wiser's, and Canadian Club all moved up the velocity charts. If you weren't adjusting call priorities in January 2026, you were late.
Use Gap Reporting to Catch What You're Missing Between Visits
The problem with territory calls is that you can't be everywhere. A store you visited Tuesday looks different by Friday — a facing gets lost, a facing gets pulled, a new product gets slotted in front of yours.
Gap reporting — tracking where your SKUs should be stocked versus where they actually appear — helps you identify which stores have the highest drift between visits. That drift rate should directly influence how often you visit.
GreenPaths' daily shelf visibility and gap reporting tools let field reps log what they find at shelf and flag compliance issues in real time. Managers see those gaps aggregated across the territory, which means you can catch a pattern across six stores before it becomes a ranging problem across twenty.
Let Route Intelligence Do the Heavy Lifting
Data-driven prioritization is only useful if it actually changes which stores you walk into and in what order. A tiered account list that lives in a spreadsheet doesn't move anyone.
Route intelligence — call sequences built around account tier, visit history, and gap flags — turns your data into a daily action plan. High-opportunity accounts get scheduled more frequently. Accounts with recent compliance issues get flagged for follow-up. You stop making the rounds and start making targeted calls.
GreenPaths' route intelligence surfaces this directly in the field rep's mobile workflow, so prioritization isn't a weekly planning exercise — it's baked into how the day is structured.
Track What Happens After the Call
Store-level data tells you where to go. Post-visit data tells you whether going there worked.
Track gap close rates by account: if you're flagging an out-of-stock at a particular store repeatedly without resolution, that's either a supply chain issue, a buyer relationship issue, or a store-level execution problem that needs escalation. Manager dashboards that surface call outcomes alongside velocity trends close the loop between field activity and commercial results.
This is how you justify territory resource allocation — not with call volume, but with documented impact at shelf.
If you're building a CPG field sales operation in Canada and still routing based on geography or habit rather than store-level performance data, you're competing with one hand tied. GreenPaths is built for exactly this — daily shelf visibility, gap reporting, and route intelligence designed for the realities of Canadian retail. Worth a look if you're tired of treating every store the same.