Nikhil Chaudhary
Table of Content
Retail brands lose share when competitor moves at shelf level go unseen. Field teams are the frontline source for competitor prices, BTL promotions, SKU range, and placement, but the data only becomes useful when capture is structured, targeted, and tied to action. This article shows how to set up an in-store competitive benchmarking program using configurable campaign forms, in-app targeting, gamification, and automated visual merchandising audit so you can turn on-ground signals into a clear market response.
BeatRoute enables benchmarking by standardizing retail audit criteria and surfacing competitive comparisons at store level.
Key takeaways
- Competitive benchmarking only works when field feedback on price, promotion, range, and placement is captured on a rolling periodic basis.
- Configurable campaign forms beat blanket surveys because they target specific geographies, customer types, and sales roles with the right questions.
- In-app targeting raises fill rates by surfacing the right form to the right rep inside the order-taking flow, not a separate app.
- Gamification drives non-core activities by rewarding key behaviors with points, medals, and scorecards that reps can share publicly.
- Image recognition automates visual merchandising audit so competitor share-of-shelf and display compliance flow back to field teams as insight.
Campaign setup for competitive benchmarking
Whether it is capturing competitor data, the share of shelf, product display & visibility, BTL promotion setup, consumer feedback & complaint – There needs to be a configurable setup to create these campaign forms with an option of targeting these forms to specific geography, type of customers, sales team or an incident based feedback involving escalation and approval within a sales team. Campaign forms can as well help in requests for community events, asset requests & audits, field complaints, and connecting with customers directly.
In-app targeting
Once it is decided what’s the goal of a campaign form and whom to target, that campaign form needs to be visible to those individual customers who are targeted for that specific campaign while the salesman is taking orders for that particular customer. This decreases the resistance which comes from changing to another app or screens in getting a higher fill rate for any campaigns. The sales team/Manager/Customer app should have the configurability to set these campaigns in-app.
Gamification
Any of these activities which need to be completed through campaign forms are non-core activities for a sales team. The sales team’s incentives are normally tied to their sales as an outcome. So to get these activities done, the brand needs to gamify its teams where in they get some points on each of their key behaviours related to them achieving their goals as well as non-core sales activities. Gamification becomes a key lever to create healthy sustainable competition between teams wherein the salespeople exhibiting key behaviour get certain medals that they can share on their social handles.
Option to directly target customers
Sometimes instead of the sales team collecting feedback, the brand might want to listen to their retailers directly and collect feedback from them. Then these campaigns need to be targeted directly to customers via social media channels or customer engagement apps. It should be linked to the salesman being able to check whether a particular customer has filled, if not nudging them to do at the time of visit on pending campaigns. At the same time, customers can as well be rewarded in terms of reward points as a part of an integrated loyalty program which they can later redeem.
Automated visual merchandising audit with AI
The platform capturing store-level data should have in-house AI image recognition, or integrate with a specialist partner that routes insights back to the field team. BeatRoute’s VM Audit AI Agent reads shelf photos, scores share-of-shelf and planogram compliance, and pushes findings back to the sales app so reps can act on the next visit.
BeatRoute’s campaign form workflow is built on these principles, with scalable setup, persona-level targeting, and approval workflows across the team hierarchy. It covers feedback capture, asset requests, travel and expense approvals, competitor surveys, visibility checks, and share-of-shelf campaigns. Get in touch for a quick demo here.
