Last week, my colleague Krishna Kothari wrote about the new normal for retail execution as multi-touch. It’s about scaling your customer engagements exponentially through a range of digital touchpoints and embedding technology in your supply chains. But the real transformation will happen in the roles of your sales teams and their adoption of the new technology.
Anil Kumar, the VP of sales at JLL, sets the context for the changing roles of sales teams from plain orders and calls to “consultative sales” in FMCG. Let me elaborate in a 3-step approach for sales teams to be more productive and effective in the new normal.
Step 1: Install Bizom retailer app on Retailer’s device
Mundane activities like replenishment and order taking in the new normal have to go the digital way. Effectively, it should not need time from your sales executives. To reduce the time spent in these activities, sales executives need to encourage retailers to order directly from the app actively. It means retailers can order when they want and what they want with transparent schemes and pricing. It also means your sales teams can lay the infrastructure for achieving their targets automatically and focus their time on “must-win battles”.
Step 2: Use Data Insights for retail execution
As a sales executive, to capture all the opportunities in the market, you cannot do it without data insights. Bizom’s Eagle Eye helps to accurately anticipate the demand in the beat/geography right from the phones of sales executives. Our AI-enabled demand forecasting and suggested order mechanisms help to do demand planning better – understand which products to introduce to which retailers.
Encourage your sales executives to use these insights regularly before every call for quality retail execution. What’s more, we have powerful analytics for middle management to manage their territories and demand better too. In the new normal, sales teams are becoming smarter with the right use of analytics and data-driven intelligence. Just ask one of our brands who converted “inventory to data”. Or ask Rajiv Sawhney who demystified all sales myths with data-driven insights.
Step 3: Remote retail execution (Communicate communicate communicate)
Once we have empowered retailers to reduce our mundane tasks and equipped ourselves with data-driven insights, our sales teams can now focus on more quality retail execution with higher productivity. The mantra of the new normal is to communicate more with less. While social distancing may limit our ability to meet retailers, Bizom enables remote servicing through our “call centre” module. We have even facilitated sending WhatsApp messages and regular intelligent push notifications to retailers on their app to ensure they never lose touch with the sales teams and brands. This way, our teams can focus on a targeted agenda of increasing the brand’s width and depth in the market.
If you haven’t already empowered your sales teams with Bizom’s multi-touch, the time to do that is, NOW!
