Revolutionizing Sales Management: How an MNC Pharmaceutical Skin Care Brand Achieved Success with Field Force Automation

A renowned pharmaceutical company strategized an aggressive expansion plan in India for its globally recognized skin care brand catering to women and baby both. As part of the plan, it was absolutely important for them to enable its growing number of field force executives with a mobility-based automation solution which would not only be easy to use but should also cater to different workflows for different set of field employees. Many of their requirements were actually quite out of the box and involved lot of complication. The client also understood the same when a leading field CRM solution provider backed out days before contract signing. Some of the points which were making it difficult for other CRM solution provider to implement their solution are:

• Completely different set of app workflow for different teams – some visiting retail / pharmacy, some visiting doctors, some visiting hospitals etc.
• Number of requirements which are quite uncommon such as birthday / anniversary reminders, capturing details of free sampling with doctors etc.
• Integration with multiple systems for multiple data points – ERP for primary sales data, different distributor systems for actual secondary data
• Complicated target setting and even more complicated incentive calculation that involves many variables and conditions
• A long list of complicated reports to keep an eye on range selling, new outlet addition to conversion, month on month comparisons etc.

Approach:

It was a challenging implementation for sure. But, Assistive team was up to the challenge as we knew that we have a product which is highly configurable, and we have an engineering team which can deliver new product feature real quick without compromising on the quality. Some of the key steps taken to meet client’s end objective are as follows:

• Multiple rounds of discussion with senior stakeholders to finalize the app workflow and reporting requirement
• 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 different teams. Other than regular activities such as attendance, beta plan, order capture, fulfilment, competition activities etc., many other workflows such as staff training, retailer issues, product detailing and sampling with doctors, camp activities etc. were developed.
• A phase wise go-live was planned to start with North India and then gradually rolling out the solution to rest of India over 2 months’ time. Assistive Customer Success team accompanied by client business stakeholders visited across the country to ensure smooth training sessions.
• Assistive team started delivering all the reports in phases and within month of full go-live all reports / dashboards were made available to the client
• 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 a few months of going live. The key highlights are as follows:

• Significant growth in new accounts across different channels within the first 2 months of go-live
• Significant increase in the number of visits and productivity of the field executives
• Mobile app adoption touched 95% within the first there months
• Daily planning of field executives ensured a much more disciplined and productive sales force on the field
• Complete visibility of stockiest data in terms of sales and current stock
• Real-time visibility of orders and multiple sales insights helped in deciding future sales strategy
• Visibility of important employee KPIs such as range selling, new outlet conversion, etc.