Conventionally, FMCG sector has been heavily dependent on traditional sales practices. Having a large network of retailers, sales reps, and other sales operations makes it difficult to run day to day sales operations and grow sales simultaneously. With changing times, consumer goods companies are focusing on digitization and are investing heavily to come out of traditional methods of selling.
According to Forbes, Top performing sales teams are nearly 5x more likely to have outstanding or very good capabilities and skill sets in maximizing their use of mobile sales apps and smartphones to dominate sales cycles. (High Performing Sales Teams 4x More Likely to Use Predictive Analytics (forbes.com))
Sales Automation Applications, besides ensuring the productivity of sales executives, allows various other benefits to a company, like helping the brand in knowing its retail market for segment-specific action, saving the sales executive travel time which could be allocated to more productive store visits. Moreover it also allows to keep a track of visual merchandising in stores and helps increase sales through order recommendation. The very few benefits mentioned above clearly show the impact of the Sales Automation App on the FMCG sector.
Let us now take a tour of how Sales Automation App can increase FMCG sales:
1) Retailer Profiling for Personalized Engagements
A Sales Automation App that allows FMCG companies to make a detailed profile of each customer enlightens the various aspects of the customer right from order history to order volume to the actual sales potential of the stores. It avoids usual duplication of customers and makes sure no retail stores are repeated. Besides, it ensures a smooth customer information gathering process backed up by a crisp profile enrichment process with proper data hygiene.
2) Route Optimization for Efficient Market Coverage
Route Optimization in Sales Automation software assists in finding the most cost-effective route for the sales reps to service their territory. Route Optimization solution helps calculate the logistically most efficient way for covering stores in a territory, along with the number of resources required to cover all routes in a streamlined fashion for more face time than travel time. Making sure that sales reps can visit a maximum number of stores with adequate face time with the retailers on a given day. Route Optimization helps companies plan routes based on a variety of factors like distance, proximity, and availability, and sales potential of each store.
3) Gamification for Improved Sales Behavior
One Unique feature of the Sales Automation Apps is gamification which helps in increased employee engagement and having fun while doing a sales job which is often seen as a boring and task-oriented job. It fosters healthy competition within a team through leaderboard visibility, wherein a low performing sales rep can benchmark themselves against high performing sales rep & increase their individual productivity.
Irrespective of how well a company solves its business process specific problems with a robust implementation of workflow automation technology, inconsistent performance and misaligned actions among team members leads to considerable loss of sales on a day to day basis. In any team there are 30% people in the same territory who meet their targets month after month but others don’t. There is a considerable headway for about 40% people to up their output by 15-20%.
A complete gamification solution like BeatRoute’s Gamification, helps in defining bite size goals for sales executives which not only works on output KPIs (Territory, channel, category, sub-category of products, sales and store performance etc.) but also factors in essential input processes or Key Behavioral Indicators; KBIs (Interactions norms, range selling, average order size, scheme application, merchandising execution etc.) for a wholistic sales process development for a company. Moreover, such a solution also helps identify individual learning needs of sales reps and target need based digital training to improve their skill set. It nudges field sales teams to fix their input processes and behavior for a resultant better output by default. e.g. A rep who does better on range selling or follows all the SOP activities of a customer visit, gets more points compared to someone else. Game involves getting ranks in a leaderboard and medals at the month end as brag rights. Those who fall behind can digitally learn from the top performers to get ahead in the game.
4) Order Maximization for Increased Sales
Sales Automation App significantly reduces the time taken to record orders from retailers with auto-suggestion of SKUs & their quantities. Order Maximization through Sales Automation allows FMCG companies to increase sales through cross-selling, up-selling by promoting loyalty programs, schemes, and order recommendations which is often missed by a margin of sales executives at the POS . The order maximization strategy thus plays a crucial role of the final push in increasing sales through pinpoint targeting. Order returns and inventory are also maintained to ensure smooth order maximization without any backlogs.
5) Track Merchant Activities
Sales Automation App allows Business leaders to keep track of the orders placed by their retailers, past orders history and if their schemes and merchandising investment is giving returns or not.
This helps the sales leaders to plan the visits of sales reps accordingly and push for increased sales to merchants. It also gives them an insight into retailer behavior like which retailers are opting for high valued products, which retailers are showing downward sales trends, which retailers are likely to go for upselling, which would appreciate more frequent visits etc. in turn helping them plan their overall sales and marketing engagement at the point of sale.
6) Solve Problems in Field via Automated Analytics
On a day to day basis field sales managers rarely have time to go through charts and dashboards. Without actual insight to work on they end up acting like just supervisors marking attendance and daily tasks performed by their sales reps.
Actionable Intelligence CuesBOT – is about using a BOT to inform managers about potential problems and letting them ask further questions and finally nudging them into an action. It solves the problem of near zero consumption of analytics and insights at the field level to engage better with customers and team members.
e.g. A manager comes to about a steep downtrend in his territory and can ask the BOT about products, stores or team members who are contributing to this decline. BOT also nudges them to take appropriate action.
7) Increase Offtake Through Intelligent Visual Merchandising Campaigns
Visual Merchandising is a costly affair. If you do not plan the campaigns intelligently & measure their success in a reliable manner, you will not know which campaign produced how much result and won’t know which one’s to invest further in & which ones to avoid. This means being able to devise different campaigns for different markets and retailer profiles, and then running them with surety of quality of execution. A campaign done this way can be reliably measured with respect to the sales impact it generates.
Sales Automation App allows intelligent visual merchandising planning & smart auditing through backend AI-assisted automated auditing. AI assisted VM audit challenges the old norm of sending a human resource exclusively for visual merchandising audits and is more accurate in comparison.
Sales Automation App assists in creating relevant campaigns for your target audience by automatic photo auditing through AI-powered assistance for visual merchandising and display. Not only this but the app also automates the payment to the retailers based on the display schemes they choose.
8) Increase Sales from Product Promoter Deployment
Sales Automation App helps in maximizing ROI through intelligent management of product promoters. The app helps you to have complete access to the activities performed by the product promoters. The product promoter feature is supported with appearance & grooming assurance, standardized communication with consumers, and promises robust sales process execution at every store, GPS tagged Attendance, in-house training of promoters, etc. Moreover it ensures you never run out of stock at a high performing store.
Going beyond just capturing the data, a Product Promoter App like BeatRoute enables your team members to sell more, improve their output & nudge them towards achieving their sales goals on a day to day basis.
9) Goal Driven Platform for Impactful Sales Transformation
Sales Automation App allows the digitization of all the processes on a single integrated interface making it convenient for business leaders to track any ups and downs in the sales process whether it may be sales drop in a particular territory or product performance in a segment of stores resulting in complete sales augmentation for increased productivity across different channels of sales.
To sum it all, a complete SFA solution gives more than just process automation, it helps business leaders realize their company goals on ground, identifies problems in field execution and recommends possible solutions and brings about organizational rigors towards sales growth.
BeatRoute’s Sales Automation App is industry’s first & only Goal Driven CRM SFA platform, i.e. besides giving you complete process automation across GT, MT and B2B, the platform puts your business goals first, and then ensures that those goals are achieved on ground month after month. It perfectly aligns with the business goals of your company and enables your business growth. BeatRoute’s Sales Force Automation software is easily configurable without any coding requirements and can fetch you the best returns on investment. It is user friendly and is available for Android and iOS mobile platforms.
