Field Force Automation for an Importer of Leading Beauty Product Brand

One of the leading importers of major international salon and beauty care product brands was looking for a Field Force Automation solution for its entire sales hierarchy that includes Beauty Advisors, Sales Executives, ASMs, RSMs and ZSMs. The company was facing many challenges and to highlight a few of them are:

• Expanding its reach across different channels such as Cosmetic Stores, Salons, Beauty Parlors, Key Accounts etc.
• Ensuring discipline of the Sales Team in terms of daily calls, productive calls, new product demo, working hours, secondary order value etc.
• Tracking discipline of Beauty Advisors who are stationed in one cosmetic store
• Automated expense management process for the sales team
• Easy and quick access to different measurement metrics of the sales team

Hence a cutting-edge mobility-based sales force automation solution, which is rich in analytics capability, is what the client wanted urgently.

Approach:

While most of the client requirements were fulfilled using numerous configuration options available in Assistive, some very specific needs called for customer development. For example, client wanted a feature where the sales executive can search for nearby beauty parlours or salons using Google database. All such custom requirements were fulfilled within a month’s time after the go-live which happened with all must-have features within just one week of receiving the master data. Some of the key steps taken to meet client’s end objective are as follows:

• Market visits were performed to understand exact working of the sales team and to relate the same with client requirements
• All additional custom developments were identified and categorized into two phases basis the priority
• Implementation, which includes master data validation, upload and workflow configurations, and the custom development started parallelly in order to meet the timeline committed to client
• User friendly mobile app workflow was configured for field sales team to capture daily attendance, retailer stock, secondary order, new product demo etc.
• A completely different workflow was enabled to beauty advisors to capture their attendance, tertiary sales and in-store visibility
• Expense management module was configured as per the customized expense policy for different roles and designations
• Exhaustive trainings were conducted to ensure no hiccups post launch
• An interactive dashboard was created to show all relevant summarized information including daily productive calls, order summary, time spent in market, time spent at outlet, daily average calls, new product demonstrated, and new outlet added
• Regular progress report in terms of system usage was shared with client to drive the adoption

Outcome:

Successful implementation of Assistive CRM yielded significant results for the company within few months of going live. The key highlights are as follows:

• Outlet counts were more than double within 2 months
• Daily planning of field sales team ensured a much more disciplined and productive sales force on the field
• Automated emails to distributor with order details ensured much quicker order fulfilment
• Significant improvements in productivity of the sales team within few months
• Automation of expense management process ensured lot of transparency as well as reduction of manual work by the sales team
• Real-time visibility of order and multiple sales insights helped in deciding future sales strategy
• With planned market visit and activity reporting through app for sales tem, relationship with retailers and distributors were improved significantly