Retail Order Taking

The quest of the entire FMCG industry is to grab the retail space in as many geographies as possible. Once a company has its products on a retail shelf, the chances of a customer picking it for comparison vis-a-vis another product and eventually buying it remain very high. Periodic order taking and fulfilment is the only way a FMCG company can ensure this happens on a consistent basis. As India’s youngest and most innovative sales force automation platform, Peri’s fundamental quest has been to reduce barriers of retail order taking in every scenario possible. Which is why Peri CRM allows retail order taking:

1. By a frontliner or manager or any company’s stakeholder who is interacting with a retailer
2. By distributors representative
3. With 2g data or in offline mode
4. From a retailer point or from distributor point or from office or from sales representative’s home
5. Copy of an earlier order

Peri’s order screen gives a visual representation in the form a bar chart to easily help the sales representative identify the month-over-month sales value of a particular retailer. This trend when shown to the retailer gives a great sales pitch and sense of longevity to the interaction. The order taking page clearly segregates the SKU categories a company so that the order taker always focuses on one genre of products before moving to the next. There are multiple packaging options for different buying behaviour. Top this up with a dynamic and transparent trade promotions module, it gives a retail 100% confidence that he is interacting with a mature sales representative and company.

Peri’s innovation in order taking doesn’t stop here. Based on the requests of thousands of sales representatives across India, Peri has designed two features that facilitates order taking and ensures that a FMCG company never misses an order:

1. Variable Order Fulfilment: In today’s volatile market environment, FMCG companies often face a situation where their designated distribution partner is not able to service the market due to certain reasons like market debt, labour shortage and more. In such cases, traditional CRM’s used to struggle as they were rigid and sluggish. Peri on the other hand, allows dynamic availability and assignment of a retail order to any distributor who is willing to supply in that particular beat.
2. Order Confirmation PDF: Traditional retail used to rely on paper receipts as a confirmation and sign-off between associated parties that the order transaction has happened and it would be honoured. Most Indian sales automation platforms, including market leaders, resort to day-end email as order confirmation. Which makes the transaction paper-less but trust-less at the same time. Peri improvised on this end and created a customisable, highly readable PDF format of the order confirmation which gets generated as soon as the order is taken. This PDF can be downloaded and shared with the retailer over WhatsApp instantly. Our field audits have shown us that this feature is highly appreciated by especially smaller retailers who are great customers of the company (loyal and regular) but were often getting neglected by a larger distributor.

Peri’s intelligent alerts, based on the company requirements, help the sales representative avoid common mistakes like missing a key SKU or not replenishing SKU that is part of retailer’s buying behaviour. Once order taking at a retailer point gets handled by Peri’s mobile app, Peri analytics generates highly detailed reports and populates visually engaging dashboards for the middle and senior management to analyse the retail behaviour. Few KPI’s that gets highlighted are:

1. Effective Product calls for the day
2. Distinct SKU’s per order
3. Premiumisation index per day per beat
4. Order growth or degrowth per beat per day
5. and more

We invite you to test Peri for a full day with the challenge of taking maximum number of retail orders in the worst of conditions.