Goldiee Masale “spiced up ”
its sales & distribution with
FieldAssist
Lotus Herbals Glows Up its
Retail Business With An
Integrated Tech Platform
Goldiee Masale “spiced up ” its sales & distribution with FieldAssist
Overview
The world has coveted Indian spices since time immemorial. The millenia-old Spice Trade flavored cultural contacts and enriched the globe. This continues to the present day, with India being the world’s largest consumer, producer, and exporter of spices. Around 40% of the world’s spices come from India.
India’s FMCG market has historically thrived on relationships. These connections form the backbone of a brand’s success, right down to distributors, retailers, salespeople, and eventually consumers. For SME consumer brands based in India’s smaller towns, nurturing these relationships is sacrosanct to take off and build trust. Yet, after a certain level of success, they need another ingredient to unlock the next level of growth and scale: Technology.
Sudeep Goenka, a second generation entrepreneur and Director of Goldiee Group, recognised that technology could propel his vision of transforming the Goldiee brand from a regional favourite to a national brand. This is the story of how he and his team leveraged FieldAssist to achieve it.
The Story of Goldiee Masale
Founded in 1980 as a masala company by best friends S.P Goenka and S.K Gupta,Goldiee Group today has expanded and diversified business operations into food processing and pooja kits, in addition to the manufacturing of spices.
The Challenges?
Goldiee’s leadership has always treated the company as one family. This strong relationship focus, both internally with teams and externally with partners, ensured that as the company grew, so did their distribution ecosystem.
However, with increased expansion came increased complexity. Managing a team of over 350 on-ground salespeople and ensuring optimal performance across every region, product, and salesperson came with significant hurdles. Some of the challenges the leadership faced were:
Why Goldiee chose FieldAssist?
After evaluating the end-to-end suite of solutions and their strong customer-centric focus, Goldiee Group chose to partner with FieldAssist to transform their sales ecosystem. FieldAssist SFA and DMS have enabled Goldiee to unlock the next level of growth and become a national brand. Data syncing is seamless, adoption is proceeding smoothly, and distributors are happy and liquid. Out of a total of 1200 distributors, around 500 have already started using FieldAssist, while the rest will be onboarded by 2025. Here are the results achieved so far:
1. Fully Sanitized Data on Outlet Universe
Earlier, the Goldiee team had limited visibility into the number of retailers stocking their products. They lacked clarity on which outlets were actively placing orders, which had shut down, and which ordered infrequently. This resulted in salespeople continuing to include inactive outlets in their routes, reducing service efficiency. With the FieldAssist SFA App, Sudeep’s team has accurate, sanitized data of all retailers. This digital database now allows them to service the active outlets better.
2. Optimized Coverage Efficiency
Once the FieldAssist App reached significant adoption, the Goldiee team also started to use the Beat-o-meter module which helped the sales leaders optimize their outlet coverage and create stronger Beat Plans with outlet-specific strategy. Not just that, the Sales Managers could track the status of different outlets (from active to inactive stage) under every front-line sales agent and guide them to plan their market visits better.
3. Ease of Integration
FieldAssist had a ready and robust connector available for the ERP system used by Goldiee, Microsoft Navision, also known as Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This connector enabled seamless transfer of data between different systems and departments, facilitating cross-functional usage across the entire stack. The integration provided significant benefits, including enhanced operational efficiency, real-time access to critical data, and streamlined workflows.
4. End-to-End Sales Visibility
When Goldiee Group began the DMS deployment, the FieldAssist team was able to successfully onboard nearly 50-100 distributors every month. Mobile DMS has been rolled out wherever needed.
Sales managers now have complete visibility on orders and fulfillment. The integration allows the team to evaluate demand versus fulfillment, identify demand sources, perform more accurate forecasting, achieve better SKU mix management and so much more.
5. Custom functionality
FieldAssist built multiple customized features for Goldiee suited to their specific requirements. For example, a common problem faced by the Goldiee team was the short closure, also known as foreclosure, of Purchase Orders (POs). In other words, POs were being closed even when they were only partially fulfilled. With FieldAssist DMS, a new PO can only be raised only when all standing POs are closed. This leads to better demand predictability and forecasting. This feature was extremely helpful for seasonal product requirements such as Gulal during the Holi festival.
6. Minimal hand-holding
FieldAssist products were so easy and intuitive to use and integrated so well into existing technologies and business workflows that little to no training was needed for end users. Both internal users and distributors were able to get up and running with the system in no time. After a quick initial training, Goldiee sales staff were able to onboard themselves and train distributors without needing any help from FieldAssist. This ease of use pushed adoption rates and enabled Goldiee to achieve faster rollouts across the country.
The Impact we delivered
Automated solutions immediately created many efficiencies within the system, unlocking numerous opportunities for them to grow beyond the ‘masala brand’ tag. With a renewed focus on building visibility for their noodles, achaars, pooja kits, and more, Goldiee is leveraging sales automation to strategically place his products on the right shelves, in the right cities, and in front of the right consumers.
After the initial success of the SFA+DMS project, Goldiee aims to further harness the power of AI and Machine Learning to enhance their sales processes and predictive analysis. With a clear vision to expand into new markets like South India, the company is determined to establish itself as a leading, diversified FMCG brand nationwide.
Customers Speak
The biggest success we’ve seen with FieldAssist has been with the seamless API integration and mobile DMS. This has helped us increase adoption and reach the remotest corners of the country in the least possible time. We now have real-time data and advanced analytics at our fingertips which helps us plan ahead. Distributors are happy and we have managed to keep our sales force motivated as well.
