Retail and consumer goods sales field reps often handle and monitor numerous stores across a city. Normally on the road, reps depend on their mobile phone or tablet to plan and lay out their day. Crippled by their company’s old-dated technology, field reps deal with disconnected labor-intensive processes with no visibility into key data. Consider the daily routine of field reps tasked with planning and executing store visits to multiple different retailers. They must not only plan how they will fit the visits into their day, but also manage in-store execution tasks like inventory checks, planogram compliance audits, selling new products, or delivering inventory.
Consumer Goods managers want field reps to spend less time on operational activities and more time building relationships with retailers to ensure customer satisfaction and sales. Brands spend millions of dollars branding and marketing their products to satisfy customers’ expectations. Fulfilling these customer expectations requires planning better visits and selling in retail stores. The ultimate goal is to put the right products with the right promotions on the right shelves at the right time. But the question remains: How do you connect your channels, departments, and data to produce the one-to-one journeys and experiences your customers expect? Today, consumer goods companies are turning to Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud Retail Execution to provide field reps with an effective planning mechanism to manage their stores, assortments, products, promotions, planograms, and more. According to Salesforce, companies using Salesforce’s Retail Execution saw:
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- 36% increase in field rep productivity.
- 12% in saved time for sales reps.
- 10% growth in perfect store performance.
How Salesforce Retail Execution Helps
Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud for Retail Execution provides brands with a single source of truth that empowers your field reps to manage and execute in-store tasks online or offline. Salesforce optimizes field execution by driving efficiency for your field reps and drivers with task management, mobile order capture capabilities, and optimized route plans. Here’s how Salesforce Retail Execution helps:
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- Access comprehensive data on key accounts with details on billing and shipping details, promotions, orders, and product assortments.
- Use location details like Salesforce Maps to create an optimized route for field reps to prioritize their day and visits.
- Lightning App Builder and Flows can extend the capabilities of triggering automated tasks, page customization, and more.
- Optimize Sales agreements, order management, and action plans.
- Gather data for specific store groups, in-store locations, and stores for product categories, products, and assortments to check for compliance and monitor the overall health of stores.
- Monitor key processes such as promotion checks, planogram compliance, inventory audits, return order processing, and in-store surveys with predefined templates.
- Einstein Object Detection helps audit shelves, manage stock, measure share and shelf, and optimize product mix and sales.
- Advanced CRM Analytics dashboards provide insights.
- Use various data types like decimal, boolean, number, perfect, text, date-time, and more to gather information on sales, effectiveness, and availability of products.
The Consumer Goods offline mobile app gives field reps an intuitive mobile solution that offers enhanced mobility with real-time visibility while offline. The offline mobile app can be used with Android and IOS tablets or phones. The Consumer Goods Cloud Mobile Offline App helps by:
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- Integrated route planning using map support and GPS.
- Support for different service delivery models in different geographies.
- Easy-to-use features including data entry and process-guided navigation.
- Process-driven usability.
- Laser-based barcode scanning.
- Intelligent handling of high data volumes for offline devices.
- Execution of complex business processes offline, supported by background sync and sophisticated trace and monitoring options.
- Create custom themes that reflect your brand.
- Cockpit-based UI: The Retail Store cockpit provides a 360° view of a store and visit-related information with live, in-store reporting.
Investment Protection With Salesforce
Right now is the perfect time to make a digital transformation from homegrown systems or spreadsheets to Salesforce. Investing in the right technology can save your company time and money in the short and long term. According to MuleSoft, the average enterprise company uses 976 applications. Consolidating numerous systems into one single source of truth will help simplify, streamline, and automate complex processes to become more efficient.
If you would like to learn more about Salesforce Retail Execution, please get in touch with us.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, we understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!
