The Benefits of Sales Force Automation for Herbal Essentials UAE: A Case Study
Herbal Essentials is a leading beauty brand in the UAE that sells natural and Ayurvedic products in Body, Face, and Hair categories. To manage their retail sales operations, they deployed 15 sales executives to cover major pharmacies across five leading cities in the UAE. However, they wanted to streamline their sales operations and get real-time visibility of sales and stock situations in different pharmacies. They also wanted to track the discipline of their sales team.
Approach
Assistive CRM provided a sophisticated sales force automation solution with an easily customizable mobile app workflow and built-in real-time alerts. The client requested a two-month pilot to evaluate the solution. After necessary configurations and minor customizations, Assistive was ready for a pilot launch within seven working days. Some key steps taken to meet the client's end objective are as follows:
- Master Data Requirement: With quick and back-to-back meetings with client stakeholders, Assistive explained the exact master data requirement and got 100% accurate data on the first go.
- Attendance Feature: Implemented geo-tagged and time-stamped attendance feature to track sales team discipline.
- Sales Reporting Workflow: Rolled out an easy and intuitive sales reporting workflow to capture units sold for each SKU along with unit price.
- Stock Reporting: Implemented weekly stock reporting of focused SKUs to flash out critical and out-of-stock SKU alerts.
- Real-time Alerts: Configured pre-defined real-time alerts for the end client to track discipline and sales numbers.
- Interactive Dashboard: Developed an interactive dashboard to get a quick snapshot of sales team performance, monthly sales trend across different emirates and high-selling SKUs.
Outcome
The pilot implementation was successful as it helped the client gain complete visibility of their sales operations across major pharmacies throughout the country. The pilot was converted into a full roll-out without any delay. The key highlights are as follows:
- Motivated Sales Team: Sales team was much more motivated as they were no longer required to perform manual sales and stock reporting.
- Increased Sales: As sales executives were freed-up from manual reporting, they could spend more time interacting with retailers/customers, which helped boost sales.
- Strategic Decision Making: Supervisors and managers could focus more on course correction and strategic decisions rather than collating data over Whatsapp or E-mail.
- Real-time Visibility: Daily email alerts on sales and stock ensured visibility of what's happening on the ground and quick actioning.
- Insightful Dashboard: An interactive and insightful dashboard enabled key stakeholders to make important decisions such as focus markets, new product launch, etc.
