Sales Call Categorization, FMCG software for sales and Customized ERP

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.