10-15 years ago, FMCG companies used to draw retail clusters on a state’s political map and assign those to their frontliners. Acquisition and growth targets were set and reviewed on a regular basis. This was when technology was not at their disposal.
Slowly, technology evolved and early CRMs translated the physical mapping process onto their software. The Beat names had to be typed and outlets had to be manually assigned. Most Indian CRMs maintain this same outdated beat management functionality where a senior sales manager or data admin has to manually write or upload beat names for every city in India. Do the maths – 2000 plus cities multiple by averge 20 beats per city comes out to be fourty thousand beat names to be managed. This becomes an administrative nightmare and after a point, no one in the organisation has the patience or bandwidth to manage this. Ask this question – is this manual, waste of time and energy is required in today’s technologically evolved world, especially for an industry like FMCG (which by definition is fast-moving).
At its very inception, Peri’s team scrapped the traditional way of beat management. And created from scratch, a beat and territory management module to ease the lives of all stakeholders involved, be super effective and help companies gain insights from Google maps (world’s most powerful location platform with infinite possibilities).
Peri’s patent-pending algorithm is changing the way beats are configured, managed and utilized and may become the gold standard for geo-mapping of supply & retail chain. Peri’s vision is to gain deep understanding of the Indian geography (by coming as close as possible to the Census of India, 2011 numbers) and ultimately offer these insights to FMCG companies targeting growth in a specific retail cluster.
Call us for a demo and you will be amazed by the power of visually seeing territory data for business and market insights using Peri’s analytics platform.