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You see those young, perfectly groomed, enthusiastic young people selling specific brands at supermarkets and multi-brand stores? What is their job?
Promoters, also known as beauty advisors are hired by brands to sell their products inside one store or a group of stores. Their job is to ensure share-of-shelf compliance, manage proper inventory of products sold and received, and entice walk-in customers to make a purchase with marketing activities like attractive offers (Buy 1 Get 1), discounts (20% on the order value of more than Rs 1000) or product sampling.
Jeetender Kundlia, the Managing Director of Oshea Herbals, India wanted to harness the immense potential of promoter-led activities to improve in-store execution. But he knew that without a technology solution that could capture store-level data, designing a strong GTM would remain a distant dream. Let’s find out how Jeetender deployed a unique made-for-Modern-Trade solution to streamline his in-store processes.
Oshea Herbal’s beauty and personal care products are formulated with extensive knowledge of Ayurveda. With a 100% cruelty-free label, the brand offers nature-based products that are made with a unique blend of natural extracts and safe ingredients. Oshea Herbals’s mission is to get people closer to nature and create awareness about the benefits of using premium herbal beauty & personal care products. With a strong presence in East and North-East India, they want to expand deeper across the country across all retail formats with innovative personal care products.
As Oshea Herbals’ Director, Dilip Kundlia asserts, “India has a very bright future for skin care business as skin and hair care awareness is increasing day by day and with the same speed, markets are also growing. You can say India has a huge market for new innovative skincare products.”
Keeping that as the central tenet, they lay a lot of emphasis on scientific extraction, isolation and purification of all the herbal extracts. Most of their products are dermatologically tested by world-renowned labs to ensure the best quality for their consumers.
Jeetendra was very keen to take Oshea to all modern trade counters and offer a more personal experience to the shoppers. Since in-store promoters are a significant expenditure, Jeetendra placed them strategically at outlets where the footfalls were high to ensure higher conversions.
However, even after the promoters had been placed at the right outlets, Jeetendra was facing a few challenges:
The FieldAssist team understood the specific requirements of their sales team, proactively followed up with the promoters and worked deeply with their MIS manager. When the Managing Director himself got involved during the project implementation, the process streamlined quickly, and there was an immediate improvement in the adoption of ModMart across all locations. Today the Oshea Herbals’ team has additional capabilities around the 4 pillars of the ModMart app: Availability, Visibility, Placement & Tracking.
Jeetender’s team now gets selfie-based, geo-fenced attendance of all promoters on ModMart, which authenticates their presence at the store and also helps the sales managers reaffirm that the promoters are properly groomed.
Personal care as a category has a lot of SKUs, so the promoters had to take stock at the start of every month. At any given time
Stock at the Store = Opening Stock + Stock Inwards – Stock Sold.
Since this was done manually, it left a lot of room for manual errors and data manipulation. With FieldAssist ModMart, we eliminated the step of manual stock-taking.
For instance, a promoter takes manual stock only once at the start of January 2023. During the month, s/he records the sales and the stock received inwards from the distributor. The stock status on 30th January gets automatically carried forward as opening stock for the month of February 2023. As there is no provision for the promoter to make manual changes without seeking approval, stock numbers stay accurate.
Usually, Jeetender’s team could know how their products are moving across counters. However, they couldn’t pinpoint which ones needed a stronger push. With ModMart, the sales managers have visibility of which SKUs are selling and which aren’t right now at the store level. This has enabled the sales team to identify and define the products they want to focus on. For e.g. in the past 1 year, with a special focus on Oshea Phytolight and Phytonight creams, they were to boost their sales by 100%!
In terms of returns, Jeetender’s team had been struggling. Earlier, if a product was damaged and the store wants to return it to the Distributor, the promoter would just punch in a return request. However, the company had no visibility of what the damage was. Also, if a store returned goods and exchanged them for some other product, the new products received (in the exchange) would get recorded as ‘stock inward’, so promoters would inflate the inward stock received.
Now with ModMart, the promoter cannot make a returns request unless s/he uploads a photo of the damaged product. The app also allows Oshea Herbals’ managers to bifurcate ‘stock inwards’ against ‘returns’ or ‘fresh order’. This also solved another problem. Earlier, as this bifurcation on the inward stock was not available, even the stock received against returns was seen as a ‘fresh order’ and therefore got counted for incentives. We solved this by letting the user highlight the inward if it was against a return, in the app itself.
Sometimes genuine mistakes can happen at the promoter’s end when recording stock inwards or managing returns, so Jeetender’s mid-managers wanted some flexibility for the promoters to be able to suggest edits. Using ModMart, Oshea’s promoters can now raise a request for making changes in the inventory. The system makes the changes only once the manager approves the changes on the app.
With data coming in from 350 promoters, Oshea’s leadership has a clear view of what is selling where and which markets can they penetrate even more. That visibility has allowed them to chart out an aggressive roadmap to now expand beyond eastern India and go across the rest of the country. Jeetender’s aim is to reach 3000 outlets by 2026 while sustaining a 50% YoY growth. To achieve that goal, he also plans to increase the number of promoters to 850. The future looks exciting for Oshea Herbals and ModMart will be right there with them, every step of the way.
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