Colgate Palmolive Morocco's Journey to Implementing Sales Force Automation and Its Impact on Revenue Growth

Maghreb countries, like any other developing countries, are part of the focus market for almost all the FMCG companies off late and Colgate Palmolive was not an exception. The client had an extensive expansion plan especially for Morocco which records higher per-capita income among the Maghreb countries. They also wanted a mobility based solution which would help them to track penetration in terms of new outlets identified and added, availability and visibility. Although there were different types of field force such as sales men, merchandisers and auditors with different set of responsibilities, client wanted one single platform to monitor all of them as their activities were interrelated. And off course, they wanted a solution which comes with flexible data analytics platform to cater to their complex reporting requirement.

Approach:

With easily customizable mobile app workflow and state-of-the-art analytics engine, Assistive was a perfect solution for what client was looking for. Although some of the client requirements were unique compared to other FMCG clients, we were confident of making it through. Some of the important steps taken were:

• Number of web conferences and video conferences to understand problem statements and getting into detail solutioning for each of them
• Configuring different app workflows for sales men, merchandisers and auditors
• A Google enabled intuitive Add Outlet functionality enabled for sales men along with type of outlet, detail of merchandising to be done, preferred timing for merchandising activities etc.
• Provision for merchandisers to report status of POSM deployment along with photographs and key SKU availability
• An app workflow for auditors to randomly visit and check merchandising and availability at the outlets
• A number of reports including a very complex Anomaly report for client to check discrepancies in terms of merchandising and availability

Outcome:

With successful implementation of Assistive, client could get complete visibility and insight of its operations all across Morocco. The key highlights are as follows:

• More than 1000 new outlets added within first two months across 8 major cities
• Complete visibility of outlet wise availability of 10 key SKUs
• Real-time visibility on POSM deployment at different outlets
• Automation of lot of daily tasks of the sales team freeing them up to focus more on sales
• Quick replenishment of stock based on out-of-stock / critical stock information
• Managers focusing more on course correction and strategic decisions rather than collating data over WhatsApp or E-mail
• Quick auctioning based on the real-time email alerts and reports resulting in increased operational efficiency