How do you mess up a store visit? And how do you make it a success?

The best way to mess up a store visit is undoubtedly to forget the name of your contact. Not knowing the product range or the planogram come in second and third. You’re working blind, you can’t even install a display. Even worse: you’re about as useful as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest and it takes a lot of time to recover from such a bad impression.

How do you mess up a store visit? And how do you make it a success?

The quality of every store visit determines the quality of the labor of your field workers. They are the vanguard that allow your organization to score. Something which CEOs and marketing managers of huge FMCG companies are starting to realize.

  • Information on field worker performances is more important to them than numbers on products or SKUs.
  • To evaluate those performances, the number of introductions is the most important, not the amount of sales.

(We refer to the slides at the end of this blog, which show data from a questionnaire we held during our FMCG event in June.)

How do you make every store visit a success? How do you conquer the share of shelf?

There are two determining factors:

  • A good negotiation with the person in charge, based on solid human contact and a well-maintained commercial relationship.
  • An overview of the possibilities to introduce new SKUs, based on thorough knowledge of the store’s product range and planogram – these are usually agreed upon by the manufacturer and the chain’s headquarters.

The introduction of new SKUs is a matter of conquering space. You have to attain a rearrangement of the available space: more share of shelf for your own products, less for the competition, possibly with some displays that are actually just temporary extra shelf space.

More chances for success with FMCG365

Avento’s mobile CRM app FMCG365 has several advantages, starting with real offline availability and synchronization with the back-office. The following features have a big commercial value when it comes to realizing introductions.

All central agreements between a manufacturer and a store are immediately visible in FMCG365. It is equipped with a very transparent account card that allows you to operate proactively. For instance, you can see which is the ‘primary brand’ of your customer, who is the most important supplier, …

There’s also a full history of every store with detailed information about previous visits.

Finally, you’ll find a clear overview of all interactions with the contact and relevant personal information. You can also add notes about customers and people yourself. So, getting a name or nickname wrong is no longer an option.

Request your trial version here or discover FMCG365 in AppSource by Microsoft.

The following slides with data from Avento’s FMCG event underline the importance given to the quality of field work.

type of reporting

KPI performance representatives