The Benefits of Assistive Field CRM Solution for Sales Operations: An Indian Fresh Juice Start-up Success Story

Introduction

Imagine, a fresh cold-pressed juice brand, was launched in mid-2017 by Delhi-based start-up Fresh Foods Concepts. To cater to the increasing demand for healthy products, the brand wanted to track retail execution through a highly sophisticated field CRM solution. They required real-time visibility of tertiary sales and retail stock of 300+ modern trade outlets in Delhi/NCR, where all 15 varieties of their juices were available. Additionally, they wanted to capture in-store merchandising, feedback about stores and managers, competition activities, and demographic data of their customers. After evaluating several field CRM solutions, they selected Assistive to help their business succeed.

Approach

During the implementation, the client realized the benefits of a completely config-driven system. Within a week of signing the contract, the system was live, and the sales team underwent training of the Assistive CRM app. The key steps taken to meet the client's objectives were:

• Explaining master data requirements to the client in one long meeting to ensure correct data was received on the first go.
• Implementing geo-tagged and time-stamped attendance features to track promoter discipline.
• Rolling out an easy and intuitive tertiary sales reporting workflow to capture units sold for each SKU.
• Daily stock reporting of all 15 SKUs to flash out a report of out-of-stock and critical stock SKUs.
• Configuring custom activities for promoters to capture in-store merchandising, store feedback, competition activity, and customer demographic information.
• Configuring an app workflow for Sales Officers to add new outlets from the field, capture secondary orders and report market visit data at a regular frequency.
• Configuring an app workflow for Sales Managers to report market visit data.
• Creating an interactive dashboard to show all relevant summarized information, including daily sales, SKU-wise trend, stock alerts, visit data by sales officers/sales managers, etc.

Outcome

With the successful implementation of Assistive CRM, the client gained real-time visibility of their retail execution and was enabled with quick decision-making in terms of future expansion and product strategy. The key highlights were:

• Complete visibility in terms of discipline and hygiene of the sales force.
• Real-time tracking of tertiary sales and outlet level stock information ensuring quick replenishment.
• Automation of many daily tasks of the sales team freeing them up to focus more on sales.
• Visibility of in-store merchandising, which is of prime importance for any new brand.
• Feedback about stores and store managers helped in maintaining good relationships with modern trade retail chains.
• Customer demographic data helped in deciding future product strategy.
• Quick auctioning based on real-time email alerts and reports resulting in increased operational efficiency.
• Significant expansion in Delhi/NCR in terms of presence in major retail chains leading to a smooth expansion in other cities in the near future.