In-Store Promoter Management for an Indian Smartphone/Smart TV brand

Managing the discipline of in-store promoters and getting authenticated information on tertiary sales is always a challenging but ‘must do’ activity for any company which is on a growth trajectory. The client that we are going to talk about in this blog was not an exception. Over last couple of years, they saw an astronomical growth in India which resulted in significant expansion in field sales people with most of them being on distributor payroll. One of the critical questions they wanted an answer for was ‘Do all these people, for which we are paying salary every month, physically exist and remain present at the store when they are supposed to?’ And next few things that they wanted to ensure were:

• Sales being claimed by these promoters should be authenticated
• Visibility of SKU wise current stock in each outlet
• Sales of key competitors
• Total monthly sales of each retailer for different price range
• Mechanism to train and evaluate promoters before each product launch
• Target definition and achievement calculation

And finally, pan-India roll-out in just one week as they had already decided to shut down the existing solution because of high level of dissatisfaction.

Approach

When we are awarded the contract we were confident that we can solve all the problem statements of the client, not just because we have a best-in-class solution to handle varied requirements, but also because of the domain knowledge that we possess thanks to our experience and expertise in managing large scale in-store promoter programs over the years. However, we could never be complacent during any implementation and hence did a proper phase wise roll-out plan. Some of the key steps which were taken are:

• Phase 1 go-live was agreed with 600 direct promoters within a week’s time
• Phase 2 go-live was agreed with 4000+ distributor promoters in a month’s time
• Attendance module was implemented with simultaneous ID proof validation through system
• Authentication of tertiary sales data was done by IMEI validation against DMS system with real-time integration
• New modules were configured to capture competition sales and monthly retailer sales by price brackets
• New modules were introduced to uploading training videos and conducting quizzes before each product launch
• New in-app dashboards were developed for promoters to check their sales data and target vs. achievement information
• In-app dashboards were developed for middle management (CSM, State Head etc.) to check attendance, compliance and performance of their respective team members
• Multiple comprehensive dashboards were developed in the web application for senior management to track information related to attendance defaulters, dormant promoters, sales insights, top selling SKUs, high potential retail outlets etc.

Outcome

Within 2 months’ time the client started seeing the data they wanted to see. They could find out the actual manpower count deployed by the distributors, promoters who are poor in terms of discipline, actual sales from GT and LFR and many other things. It also helped the promoters to do their job better. They could get the product training done during lean time of the day, had all product and pricing info in their fingertip, were notified instantaneously for any upcoming scheme and most importantly visibility of their own performance. Successful implementation of 1Channel ensured that the technology foundation for further growth in field sales team is in place and inefficiencies will be taken care through automation.