Analytics Driven Sales and Distribution Management – New Age Business

In this webinar, we discuss analytics and its role in sales and distribution management.

Why use Analytics?

From digital to brick and mortar stores, usage of analytics has provided insights that have helped businesses optimize customer experience, forecasting, etc. Disruption in distribution and working environment due to COVID has increased its importance.

What are the challenges to manage sales and distribution functions?

“The pandemic led to a supply and demand shock, that has further led to a liquidity crisis at the company, distributor and customer level” - Amit Kumar, Director Intelligent Automation and Accelerated Analytics (ia³), Nexdigm

• Distributors lack a unified technology and API integrations to manage the entire distribution that provides visibility in terms of organizational perspective
• It is difficult to optimize the distribution network in terms of inventory and availability for large product portfolios
• Projects delays by customers due to COVID induced uncertainty
• Shortage of raw materials has disrupted timelines for delivery of finished goods
• Redundancy of legacy sales and distribution channels in the new normal

How to use analytics to manage sales and distribution functions?

“It's a balancing and optimization which every organization has to do in terms of the utilization of the capacity in terms of the sales force and working capital” - Sandeep Kumar, Chief of Service Delivery at Call Health Services Private Limited

• Focus on balancing the entire value chain in terms of product, information, and financial flow for the top 20% of the entire product portfolio
• Focus on urban and semi-urban areas due to disruption of last-mile delivery
• Maximize working capital optimization
• Focus on optimized distributor network, product portfolio with an optimized sales resource which can drive a certain set of profitability with the available operational efficiency
• Build virtual training and demonstration platforms to aid virtual customers trials
• Customize solutions by researching target customers. Understand what they are going through due to pandemic - liquidity pressure, industry impact, etc
• Analytics allows you to align customer journey data and derive conclusions that will help you track at what point your customers are facing bottlenecks for closure
• Plan via holistic outlook with the customer in the center

What are the challenges to implement analytics and technology?

“You need to have a very clear-cut strategy on ensuring that you know it's adopted otherwise there is no point in bringing in a technology just for the sake of it” - V. Venkatraman, Business Director at Hologie Inc

Main challenges for technology adoption include:

• Analysis paralysis for understanding the need for technology
• Aligning technology as per business requirements
• Obtaining relevant insights from the data that leaders are looking for among multiple reports generated by analytics
• Incompatibility between outsourced partners for the technology and the business during implementation

How to overcome challenges in Analytics implementation?

• Ensure top management and stakeholders believe in the technology to push adoption
• Understand different use cases, prioritize and demonstrate the value of the technology to bring quicker adoption and acceptance within the organization
• Continuous partnership with the outsourced technology provider to help you in the implementation
• Sometimes standardized solutions do not work, so go for customization if required

How to align sales and distribution with the ‘new normal’?

• Adopt precautionary guidelines and rotate teams for in-person meetings that are unavoidable
• Businesses will move towards 100% digital analytics powered sales engine and distribution management
• The emergence of digitally equipped salesperson
• Companies will have a more targeted than the generalist approach to sales