Distribution-intensive businesses like fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) must deal with millions of retailers spread across the length and breadth of the country. This becomes especially challenging in the case of new product launches in the FMCG industry; almost 85% of FMCG product launches fail.
The “moment of truth” in FMCG distribution happens when the distributor’s sales representative (DSR), retailers, and sales officer work in alignment. The sales officer shares the new product’s features, trade/promotion schemes, and comparisons with key competitors’ products with the DSR. The DSR goes on his daily/weekly beat and explains the same to the retailers. Key retailers engage in the offering, and then put it on their shelves for consumer offtake.
However, the above process is fraught with execution challenges. Currently, the process is largely manual and is dependent on the team aligning to help the information flow down to the retailer. Demand generation and distribution effectiveness fail to go hand and hand, causing significant sync issues. This is why new product launches, which have limited budgets and limited timeframes, become prone to high failure rates.
Innovative digital platforms like Team Pulse can help overcome these challenges. Organizations use Team Pulse to create different levels of communication strategies for different stakeholders and ensure that the communication waves are programmed in a coordinated, geo-specific manner with time-bound feedback loops.
For example, organizations can plan a new product launch for all the sales officers in a state. They can send all details related to the new launch to all sales officers on their mobile app and use a survey tool to check whether they have read them or not. Team Pulse can automatically remind the sales officers that haven’t.
Team Pulse’s communication channel can seamlessly send the communication to distributors, DSRs, and key retailers, too. This accelerates information penetration with complete control. Also, unlike popular apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, stakeholders won’t be able to forward sensitive information outside the organization’s ecosystem as defined in Team Pulse. Ensuring effective data governance in this way provides a competitive edge.
Team Pulse is a proven solution for bringing the trinity of end-user, distributor, and company’s sales officers together for distribution-intensive industries. It provides a scalable, structured digital solution for today’s distributed organizations.