Field Force Automation for a Famous Liquor Brand in Kenya

YDX Agency, one of our international partners based out of Kenya, undertook a project from a leading global liquor company to drive their sales number through some unconventional channel which Van Sales. A field team of 8 teams comprising 40 sales reps were responsible for operations in 6 major counties and selling directly to more than 3000 outlets. The client was looking for a complete field force automation automation of this process to have a clear visibility on the entire operation. Hence there was a need for a sales force automation solution which can provide the following features:

• Daily inventory management from the distributor point with proof of invoicing
• Beats for each team and recoding order at each retailer point
• Capturing payment amount and mode of payment as per sales process
• A back-end module to verify the sales data against payment
• Dashboard showing daily sales, verified sales, End of Day Stock etc.

Approach

When our partner approached us with the problem statement, we knew all of these real-time activities can be tracked through Assistive by doing few customizations in the sales force solution. Challenge was to make the system live within two weeks as demanded by the client. However, Assistive team was up to that challenge and made a successful go-live within two weeks. Some of the steps taken during the implementation process are:

• Multiple conference calls with client and partner stakeholders to understand their business process, problem statements and end objectives
• Some internal change in priority order of Assistive product roadmap to ensure features specific to this client can be rolled out at the earliest
• While the development was on, parallel process of master data collection, project configuration and data upload were initiated
• Separate workflows were implemented for Team Leads, sales manager and Sales Reps
• Order Capture module was customized to capture payment details
• New backend screen to verify payments were developed in a very quick time
• Configured custom activities for promoters to capture some other TL and SR activities
• An interactive dashboard was created to show all relevant summarized and detailed information related to sales process and stock

Outcome

With successful implementation of Assistive field force automation solution, TLs and SRs started reporting data from the field without any hassle and client could get complete sales visibility and insight of its new channel to drive sales across vast geographies of Kenya. The key highlights are as follows:

• Significant improvement in discipline and hygiene of the sales force
• Rectification of the existing beats basis actual store location captured while using Assistive
• Complete visibility of stock to the sales team when they are selling to retailers
• Complete visibility of stock at distributor end and actual verified sales
• Senior Management were enabled to take a call on upcoming product portfolio basis the sales trend visible to them