Trish Winebrenner Brings Disciplined, Strategic Focus to Boost Sales

Texas businesswoman Trish Winebrenner has focused her career on effectively streamlining the sales and marketing processes.

Texas businesswoman Trish Winebrenner has focused her career on effectively streamlining sales and marketing processes of a spectrum of Fortune 500 companies, most recently Continental Airlines. Now, she is bringing her operational expertise to the sales area of Imperial Sugar Company.

Winebrenner and Imperial share the same strategic goal: To favorably impact the all-important bottom line in a highly competitive business environment while exceeding customer expectations.

Imperial Sugar Company has contracted with Winebrenner to review and diagram operational processes within the sales area and then to develop improvement opportunities with the sales team.

For decades, the sugar industry’s business model was fairly simple – make and sell sugar. Not so, anymore.

Today, it is far more complex for sugar manufacturers because of changes to government import legislation, wide price variability on raw sugar futures and emerging governmental requirements regarding food safety.

Profit margins today are influenced by far-reaching and global competitive forces, mandating greater efficiencies for a sugar company, from manufacturing through marketing.

Coming to Imperial Sugar with a fresh perspective, it will be Winebrenner’s job to map all current sales, pricing and marketing processes within the Imperial sales network in an effort to highlight decision influencers, ensure actions are results driven versus activity focused and point out divergences in protocol or process that may be impacting the bottom line and the quality of customer service.

Winebrenner has recently initiated this project that delves into all segments of the key business processes used by Imperial’s sales team. Her responsibility is to drill down on essential and competitive areas, including sales forecasting, pricing, trade discounting and allowances, production allocation between plants, product allocation, marketing budgeting and order versus contract-agreed price matching.

What she is doing to streamline Imperial Sugar’s sales operation is similar in scope to strategic initiatives the company has taken in the sugar refining and packaging areas – to bring together expertise and enhanced operational disciplines that will make Imperial the most profitable sugar manufacturer in America.

Winebrenner was a senior executive at Continental Airlines and ExpressJet, and now provides sales and marketing consulting to Texas based companies. She is based in Houston.