“Good morning Sir. I’m at the store”, Swati smirked as she sent her ‘attendance selfie’ to Sumer Mathur, her manager, to show her presence at the outlet location. She worked as a beauty advisor for a make-up brand and was supposed to punch in her attendance by sending daily selfies in the morning next to the shelf of her products. In reality, Swati was sitting comfortably in her house, eating her breakfast. She had simply forwarded a selfie that she had taken a few days ago in the same store. Swati used this loophole every time she felt too lazy to reach the store in time.
But a month ago, her luck ran out. Sumer decided to pay a surprise visit and found her missing from the store. When he phoned her, she admitted she was still at home. That was the moment Sumer realized that there could be many others who were using similar practices to fool him and other managers over and over again. He needed to urgently find a tool that could help him manage his modern trade sales team, specifically the beauty advisors. For good.
Sumer Mathur researched and shortlisted many solutions that had the potential of automating and tracking the on-field activities in his MT channel, but one platform stood out because it could automate and give real-time visibility to a lot of field workflows.- FieldAssist’s Modern Trade app.
When he and his regional sales heads sat through the product demo, they were amazed at how much they could potentially achieve in terms of visibility, productivity, and overall sales. Within a month of adoption, Sumer Mathur was able to digitize the opening stock, stock inward, and closing stock processes and also establish:
1. Selfie-based Promoter Attendance – Sumer’s brand promoters became more accountable as they had to send an in-store selfie to register their attendance and show that they are properly groomed. The MT app’s geo-fencing feature allowed them to authenticate their presence with a selfie only when they were in the store. The app also did not allow the users to upload any photos or log in to any sales if they were not geo-fenced at the store location.
2. Target Vs Achievement – Now that his team had greater visibility on their products across outlets, they could assign individual targets to their promoters. Each promoter could view his/her current MTD achievement vs the target and get motivated to perform better to reach the target.
3. Share of Shelf – By getting regular photos of the shelves at different outlets every day, Sumer’s team could measure planogram adherence to ensure tertiary take-off. They could also easily see whether their SKU face counts were ticking all compliances, and take immediate action where the share of the shelf was below the minimum threshold.
Read – Is Your Share of Shelf Firing on All Cylinders?
4. Key SKU Availability – As his company had launched 3 new products in the previous month, Sumer was able to monitor the regular availability of these new product SKUs at key outlets. Whenever stock at any outlet would near depletion, his mid-managers would receive stock-out alerts to take immediate action.
5. Audit of Merchandising and Promotions – With the MT app, Sumer was able to give his sales team the right ammunition to measure the ROI of in-store-activation levers such as secondary displays, in-store demonstrations, free samples, or promotion activation with the regular in-app audit.
Today, Sumer Mathur walks with a spring in his stride. No BA or anyone in his team can now fool him again. For all those questions he had asked himself on what he could do better, the FieldAssist MT app gave him all the answers. On the work side, the MT app helped the promoters to avoid mistakes in data punching, significantly improving the company’s tertiary offtake. It also gave Sumer unparalleled visibility on merchandising and execution, helping him optimize his marketing campaigns like never before.
ModMart – A Deep Analytics Platform for Acing In-Store Execution for CPG Brands
Like it did for Sumer Mathur and his fast-growing personal care company, our MT app can light up your Modern Trade strategy too. With better control of your merchandising team and real-time trackability of your retail displays, get ready to see your products fly off those shelves. So go ahead, book a demo today, and know for yourself the true power of the FieldAssist MT app.
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Rashmi Kapse
Rashmi is a Content Specialist at FieldAssist. After spending 11 years in the Executive Search business she decided to change tracks and follow her passion for writing. For the past 8 years, she has been writing on Sales Tech, HR Tech, FMCG, Consumer Goods, F&B and Health & Wellness.
