Overview:
The Client, a leader in the Retail industry with the largest distribution of edible oils among all players in India, wanted to automate and streamline the entire sales process and capture competitor information for their Business Intelligence teams’ consumption and use.
Business Challenge:
The biggest challenge was the manual processes that were being followed for all sales activities, which led to a slower turn-around time than expected and impacted overall team productivity.
- They had no real-time visibility on orders taken, stocks and visits made
- The entire process of capturing information and data for tour plans, expense reports, visits, etc., was manual with high dependency on Excel sheets
- Due to the slower turnaround, lack of proactive reporting, and no single, consolidated view, the team’s efficiency and productivity could not be measure accurately
- There was no mechanism to capture feedback from distributors or competition-level information.
- Since the sales process was not automated, there were no prompts or alerts to slacking salesmen, leading to slow response
Marlabs Solution:
- ET Marlabs recommended Salesforce’s Force.com1 Light on Sales Cloud for mobile devices which is a hybrid application for offline usage
- An optimal database design was created to avoid additional purchase of Salesforce licenses
- To meet the unique needs for building a scalable model that could easily incorporate future requirements or changes, custom-built reports were created
Impact:
- Instant availability of data on daily sales, targets, expenses and 90% adoption by sales teams
- User-friendly, touch-based application with minimal screens and navigation
- Flexible tour planning; availability of consolidated data and reports instantaneously for the management team; 360-degree view of data for various reports rather than standard Salesforce reports
- Hybrid application to ensure sales activities are performed even when Internet connectivity is not available
