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• Retailbean
• 09-Feb-2022
• 0 comments

Magic Triangle to improve productivity in FMCG Retail Business (Sales offices/Distributors/Dealers)

How to improve productivity in FMCG Retail business ? A question that has many answers! Stepping up the adoption of technology in sales, warehouse management , inventory management, and distributor management systems will see improved efficiency and productivity in the long run for FMCG retail businesses. With simple sequencing of processes, successful FMCG businesses are able to manage the sales process effectively. This is a win-win mantra that SME FMCG retailers can learn from the retail majors. To create this win-win, you need to have a strategy build around a Magic Triangle.

Lets talk about this Magic Triangle in the FMCG Retail business process as mentioned below.

The critical elements of any FMCG businesses are:

• Territory management,
• Sales officer management,
• Dealers / Retail shops management and
• Distribution management.

Sales data from different territories or Geographical locations is the benchmark for FMCG retail business performance. In general FMCG Business managers always ensure that their Retail sales process is structured to work effectively connecting the three stakeholders - Sales officers / Retail shops / Distributors who are linked to a common pool called Territory.

Territory, as you know is nothing but a geographical area, where you do business in and each of the areas can be segmented into several small geographical regions. When the territory structuring of an organisation is really comprehensive, it’s easy to manage the sales process. The territory structuring process needs to be broken down to the smallest portion to make it more robust and powerful ( called Beats or Routes). Once the geographical segmentation is done to the maximum possible extent, you can now start mapping each of the lowest segments to each of these three stakeholders.

In one Territory, mapping can be done for:

• Dealers or Retail shops - best practice is to map a Retail shop only to one territory.
• Distributors - Generally a single distributor will be handling multiple territories. Hence each Distributor should be mapped to all relevant territories as per the business policy.
• Sales officers- Before mapping to territories, each sales officer will be mapped to different Routes/ Beats. Each beat refers to a group of territories on which a sales officer can work for a day - Generally 20 to 40 shops in one route.

When a sales officer mapped to a territory goes for taking orders in a route, only relevant Retails shops/ dealers for that day will be shown to him so that he can take orders from them. This will add more value and clarity to the sales officers on the field.

Once the sales officer has punched the order, the same order will get reflected in real time in the system of the corresponding distributor of that territory. Thus, it becomes very easy for the distributor to deliver the products without any time delay.

Trading your FMCG products in multiple territories? It will certainly be a tough task to create the master data of Territories, Sub Territories and Routes. The biggest challenge you’ll face will be mapping 1000s of dealers (shops) to relevant territories. But once it's done, it’s super easy for the management to take out data from the system as and when they like.

The major advantages of this process are:

• If any sales officer moves out of the organisation, a new Sales officer can be assigned the same territory and he gets all the data from day 1 to start with. No data loss as such!
• Increases the customer satisfaction level with speedy delivery of order from Distributor to Dealer.
• The management has complete control over the Sales officers activities in real time.
• The principal company can have a complete view of the Dealers/ Shops on which the product is sold along with its comparison history.
• Easy to mine the data to create multiple effective marketing schemes.
• Real time visibility to the entire Distributor inventory.
• As the system automatically generates daily reports, the field Sales officer needn’t send any daily report manually.

Interested to know more about how you can do this process to your FMCG Retail business?

Reach out to us at sales@retailbean.com. Our FMCG Business consultants can help you to grow fast!