Combining Retail Execution and Demand Generation for Building Materials Route to Market

Your route-to-market strategy isn’t a one man job. To clarify, successful route to market needs the combined effort of every single stakeholder – sales rep to dealer to influencer – to efficiently get a product to end customers. 

But how do you ensure that? Is it only about getting your product on store shelves and sales occurring automatically? 

The answer is a resounding no. 

There is more to sales than simply onboarding dealers and convincing them to stock your products; there is a need to create demand for said products. So that your products actually get taken off shelves and don’t sit there and waste away!

Retail execution and demand generation are two massively important aspects of your route-to-market strategy; coming up short on one means the other becomes meaningless. 

Take an example – you have launched a new product and are looking to distribute it in all major dealerships. You talk to dealers and persuade them about the USP and saleability of the product. You even manage to onboard a few new dealers along the way, using your newest launch as a catalyst. Soon, it’s in every major dealership in a territory that is part of your network. Your retail execution is complete and seems like everything’s in order. 

But soon, you notice that you aren’t selling much or even what you expected.

What went wrong? You didn’t create enough demand for your product. 

Instead you relied on dealer word-of-mouth and passing mentions. Or maybe you were banking on sheer brand value. You didn’t educate your dealers on the product enough so that they could explain it to customers, contractors or industry specialists. Maybe you didn’t try to reach out to enough trade influencers/contractors or put enough importance in contacting them or educating them. Despite having a great product, nobody knows about it and if they do, they don’t care much because they don’t understand it or how it’s any different from the myriad of other products in the market. And therefore, nobody buys it and it continues to remain untouched on shelves, leading to significant losses and waste.

This is what must be understood. Retail execution without demand generation in the building materials industry is meaningless in the same way that creating demand but not having the supply or the know-how to get your products on store shelves is meaningless. 

In this article, we shall go into the problems plaguing the building materials industry and we are going to give you our solutions.

The Problems in the Building Materials Route to Market

Inefficient Retail Execution and Inadequate Demand Generation

Retail execution, involving putting the right product on the right shelf at the right time, necessitates that brands have a clear strategy in place. Your cement, tiles, paints, or whichever product you are selling need to be well-displayed, adequately stocked in-store, and customers should be readily buying from you. Dealers also need to trust you enough and see that your product is relevant enough to buy from you again. However, this is easier said than done. 

Sometimes sales reps don’t have the necessary data to visit the right store at the right time or frequency. Sometimes brands don’t have actionable data or understanding on what their field agents are doing or if there is a need to re-strategise. A lack of data can mean disaster on many fronts such as product placement, trade promotion execution, issue resolution, and a confusion about credit. 

Consider the following:

• A brand running blind on what’s happening at the ground level such as how many stores are being onboarded, how many of them are relevant to the brand’s offerings, how many productive visits are happening at each store, if preconceived visit frequencies are being adhered to any a specific region or area and if they are fruitful or need a course correction, what schemes are most successful and what needs change, etc. 

• A sales rep who, in the absence of a defined system, is expected not only to remember visit frequencies for potentially a dozen or more stores but also to be able to take the best routes to maximise productivity and effectiveness of said visits. And he is supposed to commit all of these to memory – an impossible task, which means he is unable to prioritise the more critical stores. Additionally, there are elements of issue resolution or credit-related problems that take away unnecessary amounts of a sales rep’s visit time that could otherwise be used for more productive work such as sales. 

Post-retail execution or even concurrently to it, you must see to it that tradesmen actually come and buy your product from dealers. You have set the stage for your products to be sold and now it’s about actual sales, which is strongly dependent on painters, masons or plumbers (depending on your offerings) knowing your product, trusting it and recommending it to end customers. The problem arises in the fact that these tradesmen may not be well-versed in the product’s application in the absence of someone or some event to educate them.

Such a situation may result in adverse outcomes such as incorrect use, resulting in potential damages that then result in terrible feedback and a loss of reputation. In terms of reaching out to influencers, there may not be a reliable database via which brands can do so or a lack of engagement between brands and dealers or a total disconnect between brands and dealers and influencers. Such gaps in communication and business lead to below par demand generation efforts (if any) and therefore, major missed opportunities.

When Dealers Don’t Understand Your Product

As discussed above, educating contractors, painters or any tradespeople on the usefulness and how to apply your product is paramount. Your dealers can be your de facto promoters where they can inform visiting customers and tradespeople about your product’s features, benefits, and how to apply it. This needs them to be educated on the product first, but in many cases, dealers are simply ill-equipped to answer questions on your product or make a good case for it in front of the customer. If at all your products get sold, there remains a huge risk that these customers are going to come back disappointed with bad feedback. 

Consider this example – you launch a new waterproof blue paint in the market. This is mostly like other available products except that its waterproofing becomes effective with a single coat of paint. If painters were to apply more than one coat, which is unnecessary, the blue shade would become too dark and completely differ from the shade card. This is important information that needs to be communicated prior to application or else there would be widespread confusion and dissatisfaction among end consumers and painters and dealers, leading all the way up to your brand.

The end customers would complain to the contractor or the painter in charge of the painting that this was not what they wanted; their home is now too dark instead of the light blue and bright ambience they had expected. The painters would be confused and upset regarding your product, a feedback that’s going to spread like wildfire, ensuring there are no repeat sales for this particular paint and perhaps even affecting your other products. 

Inactive Influencers Don’t Influence

The role of influencers is in the name itself – influencing end customers to buy from you. If there is a contractor in charge of repairing a residential complex or an electrician working on the lighting of someone’s home, and they are associated with your dealer, then the expectation is that they are only going to recommend your offerings to the end customer, i.e. the builder or the homeowner.

But, what if you suddenly find that a particular influencer or a number of influencers have not bought or referred your products to end-customers for a while? Maybe they are not doing too good in their trade or worse, they are actually influencing purchase of your competitors’ products. Either way, these influencers are deemed inactive for your brand and without a way to reignite their interest via strong engagement, you may consider them permanently inactive. 

Disconnect Among Sales Team, Dealers, and Influencers

A major problem to successful route-to-market operations that cannot be overstated is that in many cases, a disconnect between your sales team, dealers, and tradespeople/influencers is evident. A disconnect could mean that you, as a brand, don’t engage your dealers enough or maybe your dealers don’t keep up with the influencers enough or maybe your influencers are not active or sufficient on a per dealer basis. Whatever may be the cause, the consequence is always suboptimal from a business perspective and affects both retail execution and demand generation activities. 

Lack of Collaboration on Lead Conversion

Meticulous lead management dictates that once a lead is identified, whether it is from retail customers, or from projects, the relevant stakeholders must be immediately involved. For example, let’s say you received a lead via your website. You manage to communicate this to your dealer in about 2-3 days when your sales rep visits that dealership. Then, your dealer takes some time to contact the lead while handling his own business. If the dealer manages to contact the lead and convince them for a demo and then informs your sales rep, the latter then decides to contact a technical team or expert to provide said demo.

While all the stakeholders are getting involved at some stage or the other, they are not really working together in the most efficient way to close the deal. There is a big chance that by now one of two things would have happened – the lead has moved on to other options in the market OR they are too dissatisfied with your response time to be willing to use your product. Imagine how much better the lead could have been handled if it was immediately assigned to the right person and your dealer, sales rep, technical team and contractor/influencer could work collaboratively to close it.

Unaddressed leads or a delayed lead response time makes the lead itself useless, resulting in a potentially significant loss. 

Poor Cross-sell and Up-sell Performance

Cross selling and up selling necessitates not only an understanding of scheme details but also which schemes are currently active and which are not. There may be dozens of schemes for dozens of product combinations and offers that are also fluctuating on a regular basis. Keeping track of that kind of change is humanly impossible. Left to their own devices, sales reps would be unable to recall or implement the right schemes during sales and therefore, be unable to persuade customers to buy more or buy different product types together. This would inevitably lead to a sales slump and the inability to get more of your products out in the market.

Building materials brands also offer duration based targets to their dealers to nudge them to buy more during the target period. While these targets are communicated to the dealers in the beginning, they do not have visibility into their progress, or the rewards against the target on a current basis. In such a scenario, these Period Purchase Schemes fail to entice the dealers to buy more.

Inefficient Loyalty Programs for Dealers

Loyalty programs are supposed to make your dealers or B2B customers happy about doing business with you. It needs to be easily accessible and redeemable for dealers who must feel like yours is benefiting them more than your competition. However, traditional loyalty programs that use plastic cards or coupons have logistical issues. These include requiring a ready-stock of gift cards or coupons to be sent out otherwise there are major delays in getting gifts to deserving customers.

There are even “lost-in-transit incidents”, all of which contribute to dealer dissatisfaction. Also, it is hard to keep track of points and gift deliveries on an analogue basis, creating the need to go digital.

Despite the fact that your business has been doing well or otherwise, there are probably a lot of areas for improvement. Implementing measures to enhance these gaps in your RTM strategy can ensure your retail execution and demand generation game is on point. To that end, we enable every stakeholder in your RTM strategy – sales team, dealers, and influencers – to collaborate on demand generation and retail execution and thereby, meet your goals.

A Better Approach to Route to Market in Building Materials Industry

Let us explain how retail execution and demand generation should be run together. We’ll use our own platform’s capabilities to illustrate each point.

Effective Retail Execution

Onboarding the Right Dealers

Customer profiling is a crucial part of your retail execution strategy as every store needs to be categorised based on location, sales potential, product categories, consumer income groups, etc. This cannot be done accurately without a system or a robust software in place, at least not long term. Similarly, it is crucial for your sales team to only onboard dealers who meet your vision or needs, as only those will be able to generate repeat business for you.

Good profiling ensures you sell the right product types to the right dealers based on various aforementioned criteria, while appropriate onboarding ensures that only dealerships relevant to your products are onboarded. A sales app that necessitates sales reps or auditors capture every brand-dictated metric or requisite profile data, ensures that there are no inaccurate profilings or onboardings.

Intelligent Visit Planning

The accumulation of data and data hygiene is the first, small step to addressing issues with your retail execution. With information at your fingertips and AI suggestions on how to act on it, your sales team can operate in a more streamlined and efficient manner because now they don’t just know what needs to happen but more importantly, how to do it.

For example, with a system in place, visit frequencies to specific stores and the route to be taken need not be a matter of memorising or intuition. An enterprise level sales app, such as BeatRoute’s sales app, readily provides such information and actually provides AI-based suggestions on which stores to visit and when. Your sales reps get to do what they were trained for, order taking and/or relationship management, without spending half the time figuring out their next stop or route. 

A platform like BeatRoute allows you to figure out the segments where visit frequencies have been optimal, where this needs to be modified, and where visits have been productive or not (such as those that have led to an order or payment collection). All of these factors contribute to your decision of sticking to how things are or course correcting for improvements.

Delighting Your Dealers with Payments and Statement of Account

Data can also help resolve any payment or credit-related concerns. Often, it is found that dealers haven’t made their latest payment because they aren’t sure if you have received the previous payment, creating confusion and an unwillingness to pay until that has been acknowledged. Or maybe credit has been granted for promotional schemes. Any kind of payment overdue runs a major risk of credit default where no new orders would be placed, ultimately leading to indirect losses for your brand. With the right information available, such situations can be avoided and sales reps can collect pending payments, ensuring a minimisation of credit defaults across stores.

With a statement of account, brands can provide a clear picture of all transactions, available credit, and pending payments to dealers for better clarity. BeatRoute has a feature called Balance Confirmation Nudge or The Balance Confirmation Against Statement of Account, part of our CuesBot module, designed for customers to periodically confirm their account balance. This promotes awareness for both parties. 

Keeping Ahead of Competitors

Competitor analysis is another aspect of retail execution that greatly benefits from a reliable application helping out the sales team. Multimedia capabilities allow for images/videos or written text that record competitor product placements, promotional efforts, etc. for detailed analysis. Such ground level intelligence gathering via your sales app is an invaluable tactic for recalibrating existing in-store strategies and staying relevant in the market. 

Taking the Best Order Every Time

The BeatRoute sales app as well as the dealer app has an operational AI that enables you to push a perfect order basket every time, no matter if the order is being placed by the sales rep or the dealers themselves. From a sales rep perspective, it is much easier to sell something to a dealer once you convince them about how the deal is beneficial to them. Upselling and cross-selling schemes are hard to commit to memory, especially when they are numerous and change periodically or as needed.

For example, if your sales rep has 10 stores to visit in one day and every store requires a slightly different scheme pushed to it because of factors like locality, selling trends, or store type, a scheme engine will ensure that there are no mistakes. Your sales rep will always push the right combination or quantity or price as per brand-defined schemes for maximum effect on revenue. Similarly for dealers placing their orders on the dealer app, relevant schemes are suggested and the AI always pushes the right products and order size during such situations.

BeatRoute’s operational AI is responsible for suggesting relevant SKUs during each order, and creating an optimal order basket for that specific dealer.

To sum up, when your sales team and dealers supported by BeatRoute’s Operational AI, it leads to:

• Pushing the right products to the right dealers
• Pushing the right schemes for said products

Naturally, with such benefits, you can expect not only a significant sales increase but also repeat orders stemming from good customer experience. 

Capturing & Resolving Issues with Efficiency

Issues are a part and parcel of retail execution. But it is important to have a structured mode of recording, escalating, and following up but also importantly, to have the whole journey – from raising a ticket/issue till its final resolution – clearly visible to every stakeholder associated with it. This is especially a problem where a 3rd party, unknown to the customer and potentially unknown to the sales team is handling the issue. 

So, the customer complains to the sales rep when they visit, the sales rep escalates this/calls his manager who then pushes it further up the hierarchy to finally reach the concerned department or complaints team. Within a manual process, every single update about the issue needs to come down the same hierarchy. So, if the customer were to meet the sales rep a week later, with the issue still unresolved and no visibility on when it’s due to be fixed or at what stage it is, he would ask the sales rep about it but receive nothing concrete. This is where customer dissatisfaction comes into play and brand reliability takes a hit.

BeatRoute, with its Freshdesk integration, allows for every update on Freshdesk to be communicated on a current basis, eliminating any uncertainty and setting proper expectations. This integration allows for efficient issue capturing, structured follow-ups, and ultimately, clear visibility regarding the stage of issue resolution.

Fostering Loyalty Among Dealers

Dealer loyalty is pivotal to sustaining good business and long-term brand-dealer relationships. However, such loyalty necessitates effective loyalty programs. Those featuring discounts, special deals, and reward points are common yet effective strategies to encourage dealers to purchase more and a wider range of products from you. Information about upcoming milestones or points expiration or easy redemption of points are all trademarks of an ideal loyalty program software. The easier it is for them to understand what they have to achieve and what gifts are in store, the more driven they’d be to buy from you. 

Here’s what we at BeatRoute offer – 

Our loyalty program runs on our Dealer App with automatic user authentication via WhatsApp or Viber, and the use of social media here promotes ease of use for dealers who use it regularly anyway. With its fully digital rewards experience, BeatRoute simplifies logistics and reduces costs by streamlining the entire process – from points generation to redemption to gift delivery. Dealers earn points based on their orders or achieved milestones, which they can then redeem for gifts from a digital catalogue. Our user-friendly interface ensures that everyone, from tech experts to regular users, can navigate the program without issues.

Successful Demand Generation

Educating the Influencers and Dealers

When brands provide influencers with a reliable app to stay updated on new product launches, they are bound to push your products more convincingly to end customers. The WhatsApp/Viber connection allows for your influencers to learn about new launches or check up on their loyalty points, etc. with ease, without a technological hurdle to overcome.

We also insist that dealers are your best product promoters in a way where they can answer questions or clarify doubts about new products. Keeping them aware of what you are offering and how it’s different or offers more than others in its category (its USP) is also a way to enhance sales. BeatRoute’s dealer app uses WhatsApp/Viber to engage users, simplifying access and use via social media. This proves helpful for dealers to access educational videos on new launches or major changes to keep up with your products.

Fostering Loyalty Among Contractors and Influencers

Add to the above the capability of running digital loyalty programs for them and you can rest assured that you will capture more demand through them. Having a clear view of the next milestone or available points drives contractors and other tradespeople (influencers) to do more and contribute to your brand goals. More awareness and connectivity enhances engagement and positively affects ROI from community events (which we are going to discuss next). 

Conducting Effective Community Events and Small Meetings

Community events are set up and held with the sole purpose of bringing together the entire community of influencers in a designated area and engage them about your brand. Over time, even with past good relationships with your influencers (painters, contractors, electricians, etc.), complacency may set in and you may see this leading to less business coming in to your dealers. Tradespeople who used to actively come in to buy your products for one of their projects suddenly stop doing so; it is very important to maintain rapport and engage your dealers and influencers to sustain a continuous stream of revenue.

A community event or even a small meeting at a dealership is aimed at jump-starting these relationships you have with the influencer community. The goal of such an event is to educate everyone at the same time on your offerings, application methods, and product launches, while also clarifying doubts. Apart from sales reps, industry experts or technical experts may be present to offer enhanced insights into your products. Additionally, onboarding new influencers is a significant ROI on such community events, where the expenses of such an event is balanced against the business it generates. 

The BeatRoute sales app helps your sales reps track participation at such events and document influencer onboardings. This helps with keeping track of how successful or unsuccessful the event was to recalibrate future event strategies. Without such enablement, your sales team would be lost in a sea of data with no way to accurately track or classify it. The ROI calculation from such events is enormously useful and critical at the same time as it gives you an insight into the success of these events or the lack of it. This will help you either rethink your current course or keep doing what you are doing. The formula for ROI = (profit minus cost)/cost.

Summing Up

Streamlining the route-to-market strategy in the  building materials industry requires retail execution and demand generation with collaborative stakeholders at every level. Loyalty, product knowledge, and reliable software all help with this and such solutions drive more sales and sustain long-standing relationships between brands and customers.