CPG INDUSTRY

22 Ways to
Improve CPG
Retail Sales
Operations

Free EBook
LOVED
150+ Enterprise Customers
2 Million+ Retailers
By End Users 100,000+ Feet On Street
10+ Countries

Why Read This E-Book?

BeatRoute is world's most loved outside sales platform for CPG Retail Brands.
We have written this ebook to educate potential customers about the different
ways they can improve the execution & outcome of their outside sales
operations.

If you like what you read in this E-Book, we would love to hear from you & show
you a demo of how we can help your business improve your sales operations.

You can write to us at nikhil@beatroute.io

Here are the 22 Ways, one by one:

1. Bring Intelligence to
Store/Account Onboarding
On average, 60-70% of stores/accounts do not yield desired sales for brands. That
is because they onboard new retailers/accounts based on intuition of front-line sales
reps. Instead, use data based insights such as geolocation, consumer walk-ins,
store capacity, visibility opportunities, competitor presence, category insights etc to
choose stores that would yield the maximum sales for your brand.

2. Run Data Driven Segmented

Engagements
Once you onboard stores based on measurable data points, you can segment
them into multiple classes and then run your engagements with them differently.
That includes deciding key variables such as visit frequency, sales rep
assignment, promotional scheme design & targeting, product range placement etc
based on accurate store segmentation.

3. Leverage Comprehensive Visibility

Do not rely on a limited data set to understand how well your sales operations
are running. If you focus on capturing the number of visits or number of orders,
that would only give you insights into the output of the sales operations. Instead,
focus on getting comprehensive visibility of leading indicators such as hit ratio of
promotion schemes, product ranges in order, new store success rate etc that lead
to the lagging indicators such as sales.
4. Reduce Excel Sheets
Do not waste precious time of your sales reps & managers by asking them to do
clerical work in Excel. If you are still using Excel sheets to maintain any data or
update activities, you are losing out on the time they could be in the field visiting
stores & selling your products. Eliminate excel if you can from your sales team’s
operations.

5. Use Intelligent Scheduling

Intelligent scheduling implies that your first formulate visit plans in a way that
reduces the travel time for your team, while maximizing the face time they have
with the store staff. You can use algorithms to make hyper optimized visit plans
which far exceed the efficiency of those made by human resources. Once you
have done that, you can further use sales pattern intelligence in real time to
prioritize those visits which will yield the maximum sales output.

6. Use AI for order collection

Some of your sales reps might be able to generate optimum orders during each
visit. But most will not be able to do that. If you use an AI based order
maximization algorithm, even your lowest performing sales reps will know what
order they should be able to collect during any visit to a store. Such an algorithm
analyzes previous order history, seasonal order pattern & neighborhood buying
pattern to suggest an ideal selling basket.
7. Maximize Scheme Application
across orders
You design cross-selling & upselling schemes to maximize order sizes & expand
the range of products being sold to retail stores. But a typical sales reps might not
recall or calculate the right scheme to be pitched to the store during order
collection. If you integrate scheme application to your order capture workflow,
your sales rep will be able to communicate the applicable schemes to the store
staff & increase the chances of that scheme working to your benefit.

8. Enable Mom & Pop Stores to place

orders digitally
In case of many retail stores, it might not be financially viable for your brand to do
physical visits solely for order collection. You should enable such stores to place
orders to you directly via WhatsApp BOT. This will increase your market
coverage, while keeping the cost-to-serve in limits.

9. Run Display Campaigns that

actually work
Start by deciding the type of campaign you want to run at a store based on its
data based profile (covered in step 1). The profile will inform you which stores to
run campaign on & what type of campaign to run at which store. As the second
step, enable your sales & service reps to audit brand visibility through their
sales/service app so that you can ensure footfall conversion every day and
maximum returns from your investments.
10. Link your shelf display expense
with Display quality
If you use numerical scoring for display/VM audit, you will be able to link the score
with display payout to the store. This will incentivize the stores to ensure good
display for your brand & you won’t lose sales because of improper display.

11. Use multi-media product demo to

increase conversion
You can use targeted multimedia content such as product videos, promotional
images, audio, pdfs etc to enable your sales teams to make their sales pitch many
fold effective. This will ensure they don’t have to memorise everything, don’t have to
carry paper brochures & would be able to engage much better with the store staff.

12. Enable Ticket Raising from Face-

to-Face Meetings
Your sales reps must be receiving many feedbacks/issues from their routine visits
to the stores which they might have to manually convey to relevant teams. It
leads to ineffective communication & there is no closed loop feedback on issue
resolution. If you enable them to raise tickets on-the-go based on any issues
discovered during store visits, it will lead to better issue resolution & your sales
reps will receive closed loop feedback on the tickets they raised.
13. Enable in-store promoters to
increase store sales
Your in-store promoters are your onsite agents at a store. Use them effectively to
ensure you never lose sales because of stock outage incidents or because a
promoter cannot present your product well. Promoters can also help you ensure
your shelf display at the store is right or alert an territory manager to get it
sorted.

14. Turn Managers into QUALITY

contributors
Managers need insight to be able to contribute qualitatively. For lack of
appropriate insight they act more like supervisors who are simply driving their
teams and not leading them or helping them. Use technology to nudge your
managers to applaud their teams when they deserve and coach them when they
need some help.

15. Discover Learning Needs of

Individual Sales Reps
You might be training every sales rep for everything. This leads to wasted training
efforts, while those who need the training the most do not get the desired
attention. If you use learning need detection based on your team’s selling
behavior in the market, you can identify which specific reps need to be trained for
cross-selling, which for up-selling, which for increasing order sizes and so on.
Running pin-pointed training programs leads to better outcomes without wasting
any training resources.
16. Run Training Programs Digitally

Inviting sales teams for in-person training is expensive & leads to loss of work on
training days. You also get a very limited time for training your entire teams. If
you use digital training modules with engagement tracking, you can train your
teams on-the-go as they do their day to day work. If you have identified their
individual learning needs (previous step), you can even make these training
modules highly targeted based on individual needs.

17. Focus on Improving Sales

Behavior
70% of sales reps in the CPG industry do not consistently meet their monthly
quota. If you enable these reps to improve their sales behaviour, they would
gradually start impacting your sales numbers positively. Instead of telling them
what output they should achieve (which hasn’t worked with them so far
anyways), use technology to ensure they start performing the right input activities
during their visits to the stores, which will undoubtedly lead to a higher
percentage of them meeting their targets down the line.

18. Gamify the Sales Process to

make it fun for your team
Turn your sales process into a game like competition & introduce healthy
competition among your sales teams. Award points to sales reps not only on the
basis of their sales output, but also their input activities. Create an auto-updating
leadership board & give medals based on their ranking. Such gamification will
enable your team members to assess their performance on a daily basis & learn
where they might be missing crucial points.
19. Reduce Problem Solution Time-
Frame
Your sales may go down in a territory for a month. You will analyze the issue at
the month end and solve it next month. Similarly, your display campaign
execution might be subpar. You will detect it at the month end & solve the issue
next month. Such cases effectively mean you lose sales for 1-2 months in that
territory or that store. If you use automation systems to detect problems as soon
as they occur & inform the relevant teams to take corrective action immediately,
you will have much faster solutions to such problems.

20. Automate Analytics & Derive

Meaningful Insights
You might utilize analytics tools to understand how well your sales operations are
performing. But your outside sales managers & other ground level decision makers
do not have ready access to those tools in real time. If you can automate the
analytics itself and bring the insights from such analytics to your outside sales team
in the field, it can impact their daily to day sales output in a major way.

21. Reduce Unstructured
Communication
If your reps are having a lot of unstructured communications (chats, calls) with
managers for their day to day work, it will lead to that data either not entering
your sales management systems or becoming impossible to analyze. You will lose
all the insights from such conversations & would never be able to increase the
efficiency of your sales operations. To counter this issue, you should enable
seamless flow of structured across team hierarchy so that minimum calls & chat
conversations are needed.
22. Run a Goal Driven Sales
Approach with BeatRoute
BeatRoute is “Goal Driven CRM for Outside Sales Teams”. You can start your
journey with BeatRoute by first breaking down your organization level goals into
individual goals for sales reps. Then you can utilize steps 1-22 within the
BeatRoute platform through advanced workflow automations so that your sales
reps & managers can work at highest efficiency. This unique combination of Goal
Driven Sales Approach & Workflow Automation enables your sales teams to
achieve organization level sales goals with maximum success rate.
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