We all know that distribution is a critical lever for success of FMCG company. With e-commerce & Modern Trade channels democratizing distribution across FMCG brands, FMCG companies are betting on Technology in Sales Operations to help gain competitive advantage in large traditional trade network of Distributors & Retailers. Here is a look at 4 Top Tech trends in FMCG Distribution in 2018 1.Know thy customer (Profiling) It all starts with knowing your customer, doesn’t it? Deeper look at customer data of companies reveals very different picture. For starters, companies had a difficult time to establish what their current coverage of Continue Reading →

A complete and thorough understanding, about the inside out of your customers and catering to their needs accordingly, is the ultimate road to leading your domain market. If you are an FMCG company, you are dealing with a large number of point of sales in retail stores. Thus arises the need for a carefully done tool that suits this situation. Unfortunately, most SFA (Sales Force Automation) products thoroughly miss this point and treat Customer Profiling simply a matter of master data. A few months into the deployment most customer grapple with making any sense of the generated data because they Continue Reading →

But we are going to have a winner in 2019 for sure. Some of our customers in Cosmetics, Personal Care and Alcobrew (Liquor) industry have made real progress in constantly measuring the quality of visual merchandising execution at retail stores. Before we dive into details, just to cover the bases –Visual merchandising is the practice in the retail industry of developing floor plans, planograms and three-dimensional displays in order to maximize sales. The purpose of such visual merchandising is to attract, engage, and motivate the customer towards making a purchase. Why no one is a winner: Well brands have done Continue Reading →

In 2000, Gartner estimated that 80% of sales force automation (SFA) projects fail during implementation. Things have improved since then, but most studies put the average adoption to about 60%. It’s a big contemporary problem. Here are top 4 ways to improve your chance of successful SFA implementation Simplicity and Ease of use Field force comes in a wide spectrum of skillset. Even the most skilled like in Pharma industry require easy to understand navigation with near zero training requirements. Neat and clean user interface with simplest navigation ensures adoption during the first rollout and most importantly when new employees Continue Reading →

It was a phase that lasted a few months when telecom, lending and fintech industry celebrated the birth of digital identity for Indians - Aadhar. So did everybody else, who envisioned financial inclusion of large portion of un-banked and un-connected masses of India. With full electronic process of verification, cost of customer acquisition had dropped drastically, hence the viability of providing service far and wide. Then came the Supreme Court judgement in Sep 2018 that Aadhar electronic verification process cannot be used to facilitate the KYC (Know your Customer) norms. Not even with voluntary consent of the individual. However, as Continue Reading →

You implemented an SFA. It looked great in first couple of months. But the excitement faded away. First nobody wanted to use it. Then it became pointless even if they used it. Here are the symptoms a few months down the line. Symptoms of Failure 1) You have no clue of the visit adherence because you are not sure of the customer geo-codes 2) Retail coverage data coming from the system is not clear because you are not sure how many duplicate store data exist in your SFA system 3) Beat Plan adherence does not make any sense because of Continue Reading →