Need for a Sales Beat plan for FMCG Field Sales Management
A field sales beat plan, also known as a Permanent Journey Plan (PJP), is a structured sales route assigned to field sales executives for daily store visits. An effective beat plan outlines a list of retail stores essential for order collection, stock auditing, and replenishment, ensuring visits occur at a predefined frequency.
For FMCG companies, a well-planned sales beat helps identify, audit, and update stock levels at retail outlets, ensuring timely restocking to prevent stockouts. It also enables sales teams to appraise in-store product displays to ensure they remain competitive and aligned with market trends.
A well-defined sales beat plan is core to transforming your field sales management system. The objective is to consistently maintain optimum service levels at every retail outlet and ensure the right sales executive visits the right store at the right time.
Key Sales Beat Plan Challenges
1. Inaccurate Addresses
Planning sales beats becomes complicated if the retail stores have ambiguous, inaccurate, and incomplete addresses. A permanent travel plan may be affected by local constraints like a salesperson’s geography knowledge, route limits, traffic congestion, etc.
2. Ineffective Beat Planning
Ineffective beat planning may result from poor communication between retail storekeepers and warehouse management Inability to map specific vehicles to particular product categories and geographic areas.
3. Rising Overhead Costs
Inconsistency in the total number of orders collected per beat and volume of products ordered results in either hiring more vehicles for distribution or underutilization of existing inventory – this turns into a rise in overhead costs.
To combat these challenges, consumer goods companies need a single platform that can help them streamline the entire sales cycle and effectively master the art of beat planning.
7 Ways Sales Beat Plan Can Transform FMCG Companies
Here are seven ways that a field sales software can transform FMCG sales with an optimized beat plan.
1. Amplify Sales Productivity
Realizing the power of an effective beat planning mechanism empowers your field sales team to maximize productivity. Dista’s field sales management software is an AI-powered sales assistant that helps sales executives plan their visits, identify better targets for the next visit, and design an optimized route plan for all retail outlets.
The software also ensures that every field sales executive understands their role, responsibilities, and targets, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency.
2. Increase Order Volumes
Dista’s AI-driven beat planning engine matches the right field sales executive to the right retailers. It assigns stores to visit on the basis of territory, pin codes, and accessibility to make sure that the right field executive services the right retailers at the right time.
This helps improve the relationship between the field sales executive and the retailer, boosting confidence and opening new opportunities to upsell your company’s related products. This leads to increased order volumes and maximizing sales.
Moreover, consistent relationship management with the retailer helps develop a strong case for a profitable long-term association.
3. Optimize Customer Visits
Field sales reps must strike a balance between the number of trips to retailers in a single day and spending the right amount of time with each of them. Dista’s AI-driven engine not only designs an optimized beat plan for the reps, enabling them to drive more sales visits in one day, but also assists them in allocating sufficient time with every retailer.
Additionally, the Dista Sales AI engine recognizes sales visit patterns based on which it recommends the ideal time to visit retailers, resulting in fewer late arrivals or failed visits. This helps increase efficiency, reduce replenishment cycles, and increase sales effectiveness.
4. Effective Territory Management
Regional heads are expected to accurately segment their territories based on location, size, revenue potential, order requirements, etc.
Dista’s field sales software has an intelligent allocation engine that helps assign and allocate leads to the right field executives based on their skill set, experience, designated territories, and capacity. Regional sales heads and senior management get complete visibility on their respective regions and, therefore, can plan and strategize accordingly.
5. Sales Forecasting
A PJP plays a critical role in determining the sales potential of each retail outlet and region. Based on the number of effective sales visits, orders replenished, frequency of visits, and the sales cycle time—sales heads and business development leaders can predict the sales potential of each store.
FMCG brands can use these insights to run targeted campaigns with low sales potential and focus on attracting new consumers. Furthermore, once the concerned stores improve their performance, companies can strategize to open new stores in that location to enable further business expansion.
6. Reporting and Analytics
Sales and growth leaders need complete visibility into the entire sales journey of a field sales executive to get a complete picture of their sales team’s performance. Dista’s field sales software does not rely on manual data entry or any other form of manual data processing regarding ordering replenishments, fulfillment, sales visits, or even customer acquisition.
It delivers multiple customizable reports covering all variables and equipping sales leaders with intelligent insights on sales performance, revenue potential, store performance, location performance, sales cycle time, and much more.
7. Enhance Customer Experience
Well-structured beat plans help identify problems at the store level regarding products being showcased and sold to customers. Visual merchandising is crucial in driving store sales, and field sales executives can help retailers increase sales by providing the best information regarding product categories. The right products are to be showcased at the store and ultimately provide an enhanced end-consumer experience.
Final Thoughts
An effective beat plan is mission-critical for enhancing field sales executives’ sales performance and delivering a personalized consumer experience. FMCG brands must realize the potential of designing a customized sales beat strategy to stay ahead of the competition and strengthen their relationship with retailers.
At Dista, we have built a fully customizable field sales software that helps implement highly effective beat plans for several consumer goods organizations and accelerates growth. To drive business growth, FMCG organizations must empower their field sales team with all the necessary tools to deliver breakthrough performance.
Get in touch with us to know more about Dista Sales.
