Mohani Tea's Dinesh Agarwal, Director
of Sales is warming the hearts of
chai-lovers by rapidly expanding
his market reach.
Mohani Tea's Dinesh Agarwal,
Director of Sales is warming the
hearts of chai-lovers by rapidly
expanding his market reach.
Mohani Tea's Dinesh Agarwal, Director of Sales is warming the hearts of chai-lovers by rapidly expanding his market reach.
The modern sales landscape is highly volatile and lack of visibility across the supply chains and consumer trends only makes it worse. Having an arsenal of digitally empowering tools that offer actionable insights into customer and market data emerges as a powerful weapon to carve your way to the top and the journey of Mohani Tea towards a data-driven and customer-oriented brand is an epitome.
The journey from a Family Business to a Brand
For Mr Ramesh Chand Agarwal, Managing Director, Mohani Tea, tea is much more than just a beverage; it is an emotion. Since 1992, he’s been striving to provide us with the finest quality tea under the brand name ‘Mohani Tea’.
Originally based in Kanpur, his family started from selling loose tea as local shops, and now they’ve grown tremendously to establish themselves as a leading regional tea brand in India.
“We’ve always aligned ourselves with contemporary business practices. And thus, with a fully online primary distribution channel and automated warehouses, we’re one of the initial adopters of technology in our category.”
When the Industry shifted to leverage high consumer sentiments
In early 2017, the entire Indian FMCG industry witnessed a strong emergence of rural consumption, especially in northern and central India. And with the growth rate almost three times than that of urban markets, all major FMCG companies began to shift their focus to rural markets anticipating to drive nearly 50% of their sales from Rural India by 2020.
For regional players like Mohani Tea, this meant fierce competition in their captive regions, as now the national/multinational players too were eyeing to capture these markets. This created a strong urgency for them to shift focus to their secondary sales to drive growth and leverage the market opportunities.
The first step in this direction was to understand the secondary sales audience, market stats and customer sentiments, as this would offer them data-driven insights for building their strategy and devising a promising sales roadmap.
Manual Sales Workflow became the Primitive Growth Clog
Taking the call, Ramesh started drafting a robust workflow for his secondary sales and distribution team. But as most of his on-field team were still working manually and documenting everything on pen & paper, he didn’t have any direct or reliable visibility over their working. Because of this, he couldn’t accurately predict the growth scope and even saw some discrepancies in the primary and secondary tally.
It was quite a matter of concern for his business, as missing out on such growth opportunities, might have ultimately led to stagnancy and redundancy in numbers.
This not only meant coming-up with reliable data sources but also advanced analytics to make the most of that data for a thorough pulse-check of their audience. In the face of such adversity, he identified the need to upgrade the secondary sales workflow with the help of technology, and the choice was simple.
Upgrading Secondary Sales Operations with FieldAssist
His trust in the power of robust and user-friendly automation technology led him to FieldAssist.
With its core focus on the Indian FMCG sector, FieldAssist offered a powerful suite of technology-driven business intelligence tools for sales optimization, sales process automation and accelerating on-field productivity. The robust analytics functionalities facilitated an effortless capturing of secondary sales data in real-time which was the foremost requirement in this case.
Thus, the Sales Force Automation empowered Ramesh with brilliant insights into the market competition and allowed him to do thorough performance assessment stemming from reliable data.
And thus implementing the SFA all across their sales operations, Ramesh and the entire Mohani Tea’s Sales Team was able to:
Increase penetration and drive loyalty in Captive Markets
With the visibility of brand presence in their entire Outlet Network, they planned optimised beats and ensured effective adherence. This increased its market penetration and helped them strengthen their retailer relations in the captive markets.
Get visibility of SKU wise sales made at the Outlet level
With proper segmentation in their FA Outlet Database, they got visibility of types of SKUs sold at each outlet. They leveraged this to promote upselling by listing diverse must-sell and fast-moving products on the FA Field App.
Streamline and Standardize their internal & on-field sales processes
With features such as ‘Target vs Achievement Automation’ and ‘Sales KRA Setting’, they were able to ensure market discipline and quantify even non-revenue related efforts of their on-field team, thus bringing transparency and building trust in the organisation.
Transforming Retailer strategies by leveraging Data
Strategizing for expansion in the secondary sales market was a big step that was to be taken carefully and planned well. Creating a beat plan was not enough and it was important to optimize it according to a specific marketplace and the customer cluster located there.
FieldAssist SFA helped the team at Mohani Tea, in creating optimised beat plans that doubles Mohani Tea’s penetration and outlet serviceability in targeted markets, thus helping them expand their loyal-outlet network.
A leading Sales Team empowered by FieldAssist
Creating a motivated and high-performing sales team can work wonders for every brand. But the sales sector is highly vulnerable to redundancies, and coming out of them was dire.
With 60% more outlet visits, Mohani Tea drove 1.6 times increase in its on-field sales team’s daily retailing time.
Progressive and impactful assessments with Data Intelligence
With FA’s Data Intelligence, Mohani Tea’s Monthly Sales Reviews became more transparent and insightful. The teams, managers and higher-ups can actually see the numbers from every division and every outlet right on their screens and compare them in the form of graphs and reports that allowed them impeccable visibility into their sales team performance.
This drove up the accountability within internal-stakeholder, making the teams more productive and efficient.
What started as an attempt to explore hidden customer clusters, became an exciting journey of brand positioning, and reinstating of sales efforts for a long and promising run in the Indian FMCG sector. Mohani Tea is a wonderful customer story that shows how right insights stemming from the right data can help a brand identify and deliver in alignment with the market and customers.
Data shows where the Future is
There are no doubts about the fact that data and analytics is the most powerful duo to place your bet on for futuristic business planning and sustainable growth. However, mere collection and processing of data cannot help you steer your brand in the right direction. Creating a framework empowered by Sales Force Automation can help you create a bridge plank-by-plank with a foundation that keeps on getting stronger with every happy customer and every high-performing sales rep.
So, compile a reliable and empowering squad of innovative and technology-powered business software that can guide you through your journey across unexplored customer segments for excellent results.
Thanks for reading!