“We’ve always aligned ourselves with contemporary business practices. And thus, with a fully online primary distribution channel and automated warehouses, we’re one of the initial adopters of technology in our category.”

When the Industry shifted to leverage high consumer sentiments

In early 2017, the entire Indian FMCG industry witnessed a strong emergence of rural consumption, especially in northern and central India. And with the growth rate almost three times than that of urban markets, all major FMCG companies began to shift their focus to rural markets anticipating to drive nearly 50% of their sales from Rural India by 2020. 

For regional players like Mohani Tea, this meant fierce competition in their captive regions, as now the national/multinational players too were eyeing to capture these markets. This created a strong urgency for them to shift focus to their secondary sales to drive growth and leverage the market opportunities.

The first step in this direction was to understand the secondary sales audience, market stats and customer sentiments, as this would offer them data-driven insights for building their strategy and devising a promising sales roadmap.

Manual Sales Workflow became the Primitive Growth Clog

Taking the call, Ramesh started drafting a robust workflow for his secondary sales and distribution team. But as most of his on-field team were still working manually and documenting everything on pen & paper,  he didn’t have any direct or reliable visibility over their working.  Because of this, he couldn’t accurately predict the growth scope and even saw some discrepancies in the primary and secondary tally. 

It was quite a matter of concern for his business, as missing out on such growth opportunities, might have ultimately led to stagnancy and redundancy in numbers. 

This not only meant coming-up with reliable data sources but also advanced analytics to make the most of that data for a thorough pulse-check of their audience. In the face of such adversity, he identified the need to upgrade the secondary sales workflow with the help of technology, and the choice was simple. 

Upgrading Secondary Sales Operations with FieldAssist

His trust in the power of robust and user-friendly automation technology led him to FieldAssist. 

With its core focus on the Indian FMCG sector, FieldAssist offered a powerful suite of technology-driven business intelligence tools for sales optimization, sales process automation and accelerating on-field productivity. The robust analytics functionalities facilitated an effortless capturing of secondary sales data in real-time which was the foremost requirement in this case. 

Thus, the Sales Force Automation empowered Ramesh with brilliant insights into the market competition and allowed him to do thorough performance assessment stemming from reliable data. 

And thus implementing the SFA all across their sales operations, Ramesh and the entire Mohani Tea’s Sales Team was able to:

Increase penetration and drive loyalty in Captive Markets 

With the visibility of brand presence in their entire Outlet Network, they planned optimised beats and ensured effective adherence. This increased its market penetration and helped them strengthen their retailer relations in the captive markets.

Get visibility of SKU wise sales made at the Outlet level

With proper segmentation in their  FA Outlet Database, they got visibility of types of SKUs sold at each outlet. They leveraged this to promote upselling by listing diverse must-sell and fast-moving products on the FA Field App. 

Streamline and Standardize their internal & on-field sales processes

With features such as ‘Target vs Achievement Automation’ and ‘Sales KRA Setting’, they were able to ensure market discipline and quantify even non-revenue related efforts of their on-field team, thus bringing transparency and building trust in the organisation. 

Transforming Retailer strategies by leveraging Data  

Strategizing for expansion in the secondary sales market was a big step that was to be taken carefully and planned well. Creating a beat plan was not enough and it was important to optimize it according to a specific marketplace and the customer cluster located there. 

FieldAssist SFA helped the team at Mohani Tea, in creating optimised beat plans that doubles Mohani Tea’s penetration and outlet serviceability in targeted markets, thus helping them expand their loyal-outlet network.