They
say that “Understanding a woman is impossible”. I can not
disagree on that but at the same time, “Understanding and
improvising performance of Field sales executive is equally complex”.
Friends,
the conventional sales process of any FMCG and
Customized ERP
company
mostly account for the basic KPI’s like number of Retailers
visited or Retailer Call average and Stockist call average. Same is
true with sales monitoring and
MR Reporting software
of
many of engineering industries as well. Any vanilla sales monitoring
will have features like DSR entry, Filling Tour Program and Capturing
Order Value etc. With such a system in place, the sales efforts of
any sales person is partially measured and usually only the direct
product sales or the retailer visits is calculated and talked about.
For effective sales in long run, many other dimensions need to be
covered. Can we ignore importance of activities like Product
Demo, Sampling, Identifying new Stockists / Beats / Retailers,
Merchandising activity, Retailer Gathering, Working on passive
accounts etc.
All these and some other features contribute to the long-term sales
of the company. Then why these parameters are neglected in the sales
process analysis. I believe that there should be some way to measure
such parameters and reward the contributors. These
parameters can be sector specific like for engineering companies
or B2B sales, Sampling
is important whereas for a FMCG software for sales providing
company,
Competitor
Product / Activity
analysis
is important.
Now,
if we agree on these lateral activities then the second bigger
question is how to measure them. An ideal Sales Force Automation
application or
Mobile field force reporting software
shall offer Sales
Call Categorization
feature that will help customer companies derive more value out of
their sales process. This aspect helps the organization to take
accountability of even the minute sales activities that drive the
sales and in turn the profitability. Here we can identify various
parameters in the sales process and assign a grading number to each
one of them depending upon its importance and efforts required. Lets
understand it with an example (refer fig 1.1).
So
if a salesperson has to achieve 50
grades in a week,
Sales person A can achieve this by doing 1 Retailers Gathering, 15
personal Retailer Visits, 1 Product Demo and 2 Stockist Visits. Where
as, Sales Person B can do 2 Product Demo’s, 25 Retailer Visits,
adding a New Beat, and 2 Stockist visits to achieve the same. This
way, sales person will be motivated to do direct sales activities as
well as later sales activities.
How
about making this information available on the mobile application
itself. If we are able to do so, It will be an easy & smart way
to know the productivity of each sales employee and his team on daily
/ weekly / monthly basis. It's interesting to think that here every
task is considered productive on some level with a unique grading,
The sales person will never be off beat about doing a product demo or
merchandising activity again. Sales call categorization feature will
result in many benefits with few main listed below:
- Accountability of all the activities of a salesperson on day-to-day basis. Analysis on the same can be done on monthly/weekly meetings. Encouraging them to do lateral activities as well.
- Improved all-round productivity as every sales activity is measured and accounted for.
- Certain sales activity can be the need of the hour like a new product launch should be driven by an interactive product demo every week for the coming month. Compliance can be now monitored.
- This Modern system will bring out the innovation of the sales team.
- A system to measure every Sales parameters will set up a 360-degree sales effort.
“The
mission should be to help companies recognize their
About
The author:
Atul
Daga
is an expert in conventional Retail and Engineering industries CRM as
well as Sugar crm custom apps,
Sugar crm developer and
Business Intelligence
.
He has done his MBA from Cardiff University, United kingdom. (U.K.).
As Business Development Manager at Advanz101 Systems, he
actively engages himself with some high valued clients in knowledge
process outsourcing domain. Atul likes DJ’ing as a hobby. He can be
reached at atul@advanz101.com.
