- Payel Adhikary Ghosh
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Mr. Rakesh, a high-performing field sales agent in an FMCG company, consistently manages to complete his assigned client list in a very short time. However, the challenge lies in the fact that he is the only one able to do so, while his fellow field representatives struggle to keep up. When Rakesh’s manager reviewed his report, he realized that Rakesh always followed a specific order during his visits. Expecting the same level of performance from all field representatives is unrealistic. This is where a Sales Beat Plan, also known as PJP (Pre Journey Plan), becomes necessary.
What is PJP in Sales?
A Pre-Journey Plan, also known as a Permanent Journey Plan, is a predefined route for a sales agent that is structured on a daily basis. For instance, suppose your sales agent is assigned to territory A, which includes a mix of 20 dealers and retailers. With a PJP in place, the sales agent doesn’t need to remember all 20 clients; they can simply follow the predetermined order of visits.
By adhering to this predefined order, your agent is less likely to miss any clients during their visits. This means that if a store is facing a stock outage, your field representative can promptly replenish the inventory. Additionally, this beat plan format ensures that both order and payment collection processes are streamlined. Furthermore, your representatives can gain a comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, including which clients need to be prioritized for visits and the optimal timing based on store types, categories, and segments.
Why is PJP important for companies with field sales agents?
Beat planning, also known as PJP (Pre-Journey Plan), plays a crucial role in crafting effective sales and distribution strategies, offering the following benefits:
1. Optimized Resource Allocation
PJP eliminates the possibility of overlapping sales routes for field sales reps. With clear predefined journey plans, each field rep can focus on their unique designated outlets, thereby maximizing business generation, which is the ultimate organizational goal.
2. Identification of Sales Issues
A PJP establishes expectations regarding the routes sales reps will follow and the targeted clients they must reach. This serves as a metric to identify missed opportunities and the reasons behind them, prompting the need for reassessment in those areas.
3. No More Repeating Past Mistakes
Analyzing past beat routes helps in avoiding resource underutilization, reducing the length of beats, and eliminating route overlapping, ensuring optimized beat planning strategies.
4. Higher Productivity on Field
A well-designed PJP ensures maximum efficiency from field sales executives while minimizing travel and time costs. This leads to improved employee productivity, sales performance, and customer satisfaction.
What are some of the challenges a field sales agent faces with manual beat planning?
We recognize that a PJP is a must-have for companies with field teams actively promoting their SKUs and driving sales. However, manual PJP itself encounters challenges. Let’s explore them:
1. Incomplete and Incorrect Addresses
In the Indian market, field reps often encounter multiple stores with the same address. This creates stress during data entry, leading to confusion and difficulty in generating reports. Consequently, the accuracy of the beat plan is compromised.
2. Ineffective Communication between Stakeholders
Effective sales require thorough oversight of the logistics process. If a sales agent has already placed an order with a retail storekeeper, but the warehouse management fails to allocate the specific vehicle for that product in the designated geography, it tarnishes the reputation. Such breakdowns in communication hinder effective beat planning.
3. On-Ground Constraints
Without the appropriate knowledge and tools, identifying the optimal route for the beat becomes challenging. While beat planning can be manually completed, field reps may encounter on-ground constraints such as route restrictions and traffic congestion due to a lack of real-time understanding of the route scenarios.
4. Unfair Load Balancing
Discrepancies in the total number of orders collected per beat and the volume of products ordered result in either over-hiring vehicles for distribution or underutilizing existing transportation resources, leading to significant cost overheads. Achieving balanced load distribution becomes crucial for cost-effective operations.
How can BreezeFSM help in PJP?
BreezeFSM has developed a fully customizable field sales management application. From performance tracking to setting up optimized PJP plans, we make selling easy for field sales agents. Our application includes the ability to geo-fence the territory assigned to a particular sales rep. This ensures seamless adherence to the PJP, as the agent cannot clock in his activity outside the designated area.
The real-time map view provides a consolidated report on the agent’s journey and analyzes productivity. With over 50 reporting styles, we enable management to view optimized routes for the best sales strategies. At BreezeFSM, we believe in empowering your frontline force to streamline processes and automate mundane tasks.
To learn more about our product, contact us today!
