Field Sales Software Is a Must-have For Every FMCG Company
Field sales management is a highly complicated process for FMCG companies as they deal with multiple distributors, retailers, and other channel partners. Field sales teams are constantly under pressure to expand sales, strengthen relationships with channel partners, identify opportunities to upsell and cross-sell, and keep tabs on the evolving consumer dynamics.
Field sales software becomes mission-critical to ensure field sales teams focus all their energies on strategic tasks rather than spending time on manual, repetitive administrative tasks.
FMCG sales leaders must have watertight control of field sales operations to ensure higher conversion rates. Sales leaders in the consumer goods industry require field sales reps to be agile, maintain strong relationships with retailers, and ensure highly efficient sales operations.
Key Challenges For FMCG Field Sales Teams
- Ineffective geo-coding: Inaccurate, ambiguous addresses of retail stores create obstacles for field sales executives in the form of a lack of communication between warehouse management and retail stores, inability to manage route limits, traffic congestion, inconsistency in order collection, etc.
- Lack of visibility and control: Senior sales and business development leaders do not have complete visibility into sales operations, leading to inefficiencies in sales performance management.
- Manual processing: Sales teams lose critical time and effort by focusing on manual, repetitive administrative tasks rather than strategizing on closing deals and accelerating top-line growth.
- Poor order management: The inability to streamline order collection and replenishments leads to high-cost overheads as FMCG companies end up either hiring more vehicles for transportation or underutilizing the existing ones.
In this piece, we will discover how a field sales application empowers the field sales team by streamlining fragmented lead data, improving sales productivity, strengthening relationships with distributors and retailers, and closing more deals.
Top 10 Benefits of Field Sales Software for FMCG companies
1. Maximize Sales Productivity
Field sales software enables FMCG sales teams to design an effective sales beat or a permanent sales journey plan to ensure field sales executives plan their visits and identify better targets for the next stop. Moreover, it facilitates striking a balance between the number of trips made to a particular retailer and the time allocated to each.
Also Read: 7 Ways Sales Beat Plan Can Transform FMCG Companies
Dista’s AI-powered field sales software helps manage tedious administrative tasks, including daily attendance, task management, lead allocation and prioritization, reducing the approval cycle time, and dynamic route planning. It also assists in allocating time to a particular sales visit, ensures increased sales effectiveness, and amplifies productivity.
2. Increase Efficiency in Scheduling and Routing
Scheduling and routing are different activities that require distinct functionalities. Scheduling helps field sales executives plan their visits appropriately with consistent frequencies based on the assigned location.
Dista’s AI-powered field sales tool equips field sales executives to schedule their visits based on multiple variables, such as allocating and prioritizing retailers, the number of trips required to a single retailer, and identifying sales visit patterns to recommend the best possible time to visit these retailers. Dynamic routing assists field sales executives in creating the most optimized route for field sales teams and ensures sales executives meet the right retailer at the right time.
Also Read: Leading consumer goods company revamps its scheduling and routing process with Dista
3. Increase Order Sizes
Maximizing orders per sales visit is an essential KPI to measure the performance of field sales executives. Regional sales heads and warehouse managers can take decisive actions by getting complete visibility through sales audit trails.
Dista’s AI-driven recommendation engine analyzes sales visit patterns to equip sales leaders with actionable insights and run different trade promotion schemes to maximize order sizes. Furthermore, it also helps reduce obstacles in the order replenishment process resulting in process optimization.
Also Read: Dista improves lead and work order management for a consumer goods leader
4. Notify In Real-Time
Contextual notifications to field sales executives empower them to stay on top of their game. The mobile field sales app sends multiple personalized alerts based on the field executive’s past lead interactions and location activity.
Dista’s AI-powered mobile field sales application sends multiple types of intuitive notifications, including reminders for unsanctioned leads, notifying managers about a lead assignment to a sales executive, highlighting the follow-ups or fixed meetings, and messages regarding nearby leads or customers. Moreover, it helps sales executives collaborate with other team members with custom messaging, policy updates, and critical program highlights.
Real-time notifications play a critical role in task management for field sales executives. It acts as an assistant to manage sales tasks efficiently and amplifies productivity. Several repetitive tasks, such as alerts for daily check-ins and check-outs, alerts for nearby customers during a sales visit, rebroadcasting unassigned leads, and much more, are automated to drive productivity.
5. Faster Invoicing
Having a mobile field sales application at your fingertips enables field executives to manage the invoicing process smoothly without the need to get in touch with the back-end team. As a result, this helps in cutting down the invoicing cycle significantly and removes any waiting time involved with the process.
The dynamic nature of FMCG sales requires field executives to be agile and close deals swiftly. Faster invoicing makes the job of field sales executives easier and helps increase conversion rates for regional growth leaders. It also helps warehouse management to manage the order replenishment process seamlessly and enhances control over product requirements.
6. Facilitate Market Expansion
Powerful location-driven real-time analytics from the field sales software, such as consumer demographics, purchasing power, real estate prices, order fulfillment, and replenishments, along with retail store sales trips, enable sales and customer development leaders to design a blueprint for market expansion.
Field sales software equips product leaders to understand their customer affinity in different regions and helps them optimize their go-to-market strategy.
Moreover, marketing leaders can track the impact of visual merchandising tactics and improve their messaging. It is a crucial enabler in trade zone promotions to target areas with low awareness or lack of retail store presence and carry out a strategy to increase the number of servicing outlets.
Also Read: Disrupting retail and FMCG with location intelligence
7. Encourage Cross-Selling And Up-Selling
Dista’s powerful mobile field sales app offers insights on the move to field sales executives to make decisions on the go. Field executives can utilize multiple data points regarding orders fulfilled, type of product ordered, orders booked, and frequency of sales trips to a single retail store, drawing a holistic picture for upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
Furthermore, sales executives can make on-site decisions by using sales visit audit trail, real-time smart notifications related to multiple seasonal offers, discount opportunities, or other schemes and upsell to drive sales maximization.
8. Strengthen Relationship With Retailers
Field sales software is a valuable asset to ensure strong relationships with retailers. A robust process through regular sales visits ensures field executives allocate the right amount of face-time with the right retailers and drive necessary commitments to maximize sales coverage.
It enables FMCG organizations to have a consistent brand representation and communication with retailers. This consistency plays a critical role in staying ahead of the competition, reducing the need for an intermediary to maintain contact between retailers and FMCG companies.
9. Prioritization Of Retail Stores
One of the most valuable insights from Dista’s field sales software for FMCG companies is to analyze the sales potential of retail stores. FMCG companies typically require location-driven analytics to prioritize the right store for the correct product categories.
Sales visits to each retail store, type of orders, orders booked, and recurring visits to a particular store for a specific category of product are all critical data points for sales leaders to prioritize certain retail stores. As a result of these data points, trade promotion schemes can also be optimized and targeted to the right consumer demographic.
10. Maximize Cost Efficiency
Eliminating dependencies on paper-based manual processes is a crucial way to reduce administrative cost overhead. Scheduling and beat plan optimization help in enhancing market coverage, increases the potential to accelerate sales, and reduces cost.
Reducing the time to book and replenish orders with regular sales visits helps drive down stock wastage. Stock monitoring capability also helps in lowering stock pilferage. Process optimizations at every sales cycle stage significantly reduce costs for FMCG organizations.
Final Thoughts
FMCG organizations need an agile system at the heart of their sales organization to accelerate revenue and elevate sales conversions. Dista’s mobile field sales application is an easily configurable system with an intuitive user interface that streamlines field sales management and enriches sales leaders with actionable intelligence.
Get in touch with us to know more about Dista Sales.
