SFA Solution for Herbal Essentials – UAE

Herbal Essentials is a leading beauty brand of UAE that sells number of natural and Ayurvedic products in Body, Face and Hair category. In order to manage the retail sales operations, they deployed 15 sales executives to cover all major pharmacies across five leading cities of UAE. However, they wanted to enable their sales team with a sophisticated sales force automation solution to streamline the sales operations and to get a real-time visibility of sales and stock situation in different pharmacies. Of course, they also wanted to track discipline of the sales team.

Approach

With easily customizable mobile app workflow and already built-in numerous real-time alerts, Assistive was a perfect solution for what client was looking for. However, client was not sure whether Assistive will meet all their requirement and hence asked for a two-month pilot to evaluate the same. The challenge was accepted. After doing necessary configurations and minor customizations, we were ready for a pilot launch within seven working days. Some of the key steps taken to meet client’s end objective are as follows:

• With quick and back-to-back meetings with client stakeholders, we explained exact master data requirement and got the 100% correct data on the very first go
• Implemented geo-tagged and time-stamped attendance feature to track sales team discipline
• Rolled out an easy and intuitive sales reporting workflow to capture units sold for each SKU along with unit price
• Implemented weekly stock reporting of focused SKUs to flash out critical and out-of-stock SKU alert
• Configured pre-defined real-time alerts for end client to track discipline and sales numbers
• Developed an interactive dashboard to get a quick snapshot of sales team performance, monthly sales trend across different emirates and high selling SKUs

Outcome

The pilot implementation was quite successful as it helped the client gain complete visibility of their sales operations across major pharmacies throughout the country. The pilot was converted in to a full roll-out without any delay. The key highlights are as follows:

• Sales team was much more motivated as they were no longer required to perform manual sales and stock reporting
• As they were freed-up from such activities, they could spend more time interacting with the retailers / customers which helped in sales boost up
• Supervisors and managers focusing more on course correction and strategic decisions rather than collating data over Whatsapp or E-mail
• Daily email alerts on sales and stock ensured visibility of what’s happening on the ground and quick actioning
• An interactive and insightful dashboard enabling key stakeholders to make important decisions such as focus markets, new product launch etc.