Sales Force Automation Solution for Tata Swach

Tata Swach is the flagship water purifier product of Tata Chemicals that uses latest purification technology. The brand has a sales force deployed all across India to manage the sales from General Trade channel. However, lack of a robust Sales Force Automation solution was becoming a hindrance to effectively manage and boost up GT sales. That’s when they were looking for an SFA solution which will have all the following features: 

• Capturing daily orders by the Area Sales Executives
• Capturing order fulfillment details at retailer level
• Tracking merchandising activities at the outlets
• Adding new outlets directly from the app
• Tracking market visits done by the ASMs
• An interactive and customizable dashboard to track sales and ASE productivity

Approach

It doesn’t always happen that everything that a client is looking for is available in one solution. But that’s what exactly happened in this case. With so many standardized workflows and numerous configuration options available in 1Channel, all we had to do was effectively utilizing those available options and doing some minor customizations for a quick roll-out. The key activities in project execution were as follows:

• Held multiple meetings with key stakeholders to understand their concern with the sales force and what is that they are looking for
• Quick implementation of the customized solution ensuring an intuitive mobile app workflow for the sales force
• Uploaded all the master data such as product hierarchy, SKU pricing, retailer database etc.
• Implemented geo-tagged and time-stamped Order Capture, Order Fulfilment and Visual Merchandising module for the ASEs
• Implemented Market Working module for the ASMs
• Sales team were trained through web conferencing in small batches to ensure training sessions are effective
• Developed and interactive dashboard showing ASE productivity, coverage, product wise sales, retailer wise sales etc.
• Implemented automated email based reports on key parameters to measure daily ASE productivity
• User activity was closely monitored to quickly address usability issues and constraints leading to a rapid adoption of the system

Outcome

With successful implementation of 1Channel solution, sales team started reporting relevant data from retail outlets without any hassle and client could get complete visibility and insight of its sales operations all across India for the General Trade channel which is always difficult to track and manage compared to Modern Trade. The key highlights are as follows:

• Significant improvement in discipline and process compliance of the sales force
• Within three months, there was significant improvements in all key performance parameters such as Daily Visits, Productive Calls and Time Spent in the Market
• More than 5000 new retail GT outlets were added in 320 cities
• Visible improvements were noticed in overall sales volume
• Fulfilment issues were quickly identified to initiate necessary actions
• Increasing number of market visits by ASMs resulting in positive improvement of many aspects that directly impact sales
• Top retailers across states were identified and rewarded
• Email based performance reports and SMS alerts ensured quick auctioning as and when required
• Interactive and insightful dashboard provided complete visibility on sales team productivity, order volume, retailer database and high-selling models