Divide and Conquer:
Sales Points Database Management
Let's talk about the harmonization and segmentation of the customer base. Today, FMCG companies around the world have accumulated huge amounts of data on retail outlets. The average universe of a national producer is ≈ 1 million records. The customer base is one of the most important assets of the company, and ideally it contains:
- List of all points of sale in the distribution area.
- Addresses in FIAS format with reference to GPS coordinates.
- Point of sales segmented by format, turnover, geography, etc. classifiers.
What is the reality?
Sales teams and brand managers are forced to develop sales based on inaccurate and unstructured information:
- Millions of points that are not identified by address and geocode.
- Huge number of duplicates.
- Segmentation based on questionable data.
- New chain stores that appear in the database with a long delay.
What is the danger of unclear master data?
In our experience, after analysis and harmonization, the database of FMCG manufacturers reduces from 1 million to 250-300 thousand active sales points. Think about these numbers: there are 3-4 times more "garbage" records than real ones!
What does this situation with master data lead to?
- Missed sales (the company sells the wrong product, the wrong way and with the wrong prices).
- Budget overruns on promo and motivation of distributors.
- Underestimating or overestimating the potential of territories / formats / segments.
- High transaction and communication costs.
- Disruption of interaction between departments.
- Difficult management of territories and routes.
- Poor quality of field activities.
How to restore order in the database of points?
Harmonization of the customer base requires an integrated system approach. For example, in the project outline, you can use both third-party services and your own data cleansing tools. This allows you to "clean up" and segment the bulk of the master data in a few months, and then keep them in good state.
Let's summarize the results. A complete database of retail outlets and adequate segmentation allow you to get an unambiguous picture of the territory and evaluate:
- Potential of the territory (what formats of points are present, whether the turns of these points correspond to their formats).
- Efficiency of sales channels (do you need distributors to work with local networks, or are you ready for direct deliveries)
- Number of white spots on the territory (points where you are not present);
- Efficiency of field staff routes.
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