They are running driverless cars now by relying on software intelligence. My focus in this blog is a much lesser possibility, however highlights significantly impactful of use technology to make distributor field visits more meaningful in FMCG and Consumer durables industry. Consider this when your goal is get maximum bang from the buck you spend on travelling around the county as a sales manager –
Integrated Primary and Secondary Performance
While primary sales, outstanding credit resides in your ERP system, secondary sales and fulfilment data either resides in papers or resides in another system these days. It’s important to get an integrated view. Sales teams should expect a system that brings together data from Primary ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Navision, Xcepta or even Tally and put it in the context of last mile retail execution (or sales force automation data or secondary sales data…people use different terms these days).
Retail landscape visualization
Trick is not to be happy about 10% growth from a territory. It does stop after a couple of quarters or vanishes unless you keep an eye. With technology it is possible to analyze retail and distribution landscape to keep it optimized. Distributor’s capacity to serve the marketplace is crucial to success. Your competitor may be getting most of its share from a class of retail stores, however if you want to cut into it, you got to have a strategy around which class of stores to attack first and having a suitable distributor for it.
Alignment with our brand v/s Competitors
Demand analytics from your software system. Analytics that can help you see patterns of distributor behavior and treatment for different category of your products and visualize that with respect to competing brands. It will help you meet right distributors with right agenda. Connect with us for free demo.
