One of the most important aspect of field team operations is Beat Planning, sometimes referred as PJP (Permanent Journey Plan) also. Be it for your sales executives or merchandisers or any other field employee, an effective beat plan can contribute immensely towards meeting your overall business goals. The bigger the team is, higher is the risk associated with inefficient beat planning. That’s why it plays an even bigger role in case of FMCG and Beverage industry where the field team is not just bigger in size, they also cover almost every inhabited place on the earth. So, let’s first discuss what benefits a company can get if it has a... (read more)

If you are contemplating buying an SFA solution to automate your sales operations, sooner or later you’ll face the dilemma of ‘Whom should I go with?’. With the wave of digitization picking up globally, more and more players are entering the SFA space. How then, do you arrive at the right provider? The first and foremost thing for you to do is a ‘needs analysis’? Have an understanding of why you need an SFA solution, what is it that you would like to achieve. It is okay to not have the perfect answers, but it is important to have a broad picture keeping long term business objectives in mind. With your needs established, you move on to the... (read more)

When you decide to implement a software solution in your organization, one of the biggest challenge that you face is ensuring your data will remain safe, secured and compliant as per company or government policies. A lot of time and energy of many people, including that of senior stakeholders, is spent on addressing those concerns and mitigating the associated risks. And the same holds true when you are planning to roll out a Sales Force Automation solution as it captures valuable information such as market penetration, beats, sales data, customer credit history, marketing campaigns, new launches etc. While an exercise to evaluate those... (read more)

Tracking and improving productivity of the field team managing retail execution is one of the most important priority for any company these days. No matter whether the team is tasked with performing visual merchandising activities or capturing secondary order details or expanding retail footprint, you can only manage their productivity provided you have defined right set of KPI metrics for your team and enabled them with a state-of-the-art mobility based SFA solution which can track those metrics. It’s and old practice to track field team productivity by simply counting number of daily visits / calls. While this may work well in some... (read more)