Sales Force Automation for a distributor of Mother & Baby Care brand

One of the leading importers and distributors of major international mother and baby care brand was looking for a Sales Force Automation solution for its entire sales hierarchy that includes Sales Executives, Sales Officers, ASMs, ASEs, RSMs and Sales Managers. The company was facing many challenges and to highlight a few of them are:

• Expanding its retailer base across different channels such as pharmacy, hospital, baby shop, General Store, Super Market etc. and also in some of the new geographies such as north-eastern states.
• Ensuring discipline of the Sales Executives in terms of daily calls, productive calls, lines per productive call, working hours, secondary order value etc.
• Tracking retailer stock, order fulfilment status and brand visibility at retail outlets
• Easy and quick access to different measurement metrics of the sales team

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

Approach:

While most of the client requirements were fulfilled using numerous configuration options available with Assistive, some very specific needs called for customer development. For example, client wanted every order to be digitally signed by the retailer at the time of order placement. However, all such custom requirements were fulfilled within a month’s time after the go-live which happened with all must-have features within just 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 sales team to capture daily attendance, retailer stock, secondary order, fulfilment, brand visibility etc.
• 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, daily average calls, SKU wise current stock at distributor points
• Regular progress report in terms of system usage was shared with client to drive the adoption

Outcome:

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

• Outlet counts were more than double only within 4 months
• As the business expanded, strength of the sales team was increased by more than 25%
• Daily planning of SEs ensured a much more disciplined and productive sales force on the field
• Visibility retailer stock helped in deciding replenishment plan
• 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 SEs, relationship with retailers and distributors were improved significantly