The AI-Enabled Field Sales Force

Stage 3: Coach

Most field teams already have more alerts than time. ROI comes from knowing which ones are worth acting on.

By Sam Barclay, Chief Growth Officer, StayinFront

The Process, Briefly

This post covers stage three, where data turns into a decision the representative can carry out in store.

The Alert Graveyard

Most consumer goods field organizations find themselves lost in an alert graveyard.

Field systems generate a steady stream of alerts for out-of-stocks, price gaps, compliance fails, and distribution voids. The trouble starts when a representative sees eighteen alerts on a visit, has time for four, and has no way of knowing which four matter most.

An alert can only tell the representative what is wrong in the store. What they need to drive value is a decision that spells out what to do, why it matters, what to say, and what the action is worth.

A Coaching Story with a Number Attached

A leading global snack maker in Canada ran into a problem that will be familiar to anyone who has managed trade promotions in a major grocery banner.

After a promotion, stores can be left holding excess inventory. Store managers then reduce target days of cover to fix their inventory metric, which can cut into on-shelf availability and future sales.

StayinFront RDI built a long-stock coach that identifies store-SKU combinations sitting above an agreed threshold, calculated against pre-promotion rate of sale. The alert itself was only part of it. The team built it into the representative’s routine, so the representative checks the stock, finds a full-margin placement opportunity for the excess, and works it out with the store manager. He gets help with his inventory problem, and the conversation stops being about defending shelf space.

This is the clearest ROI case in the series, and the numbers break down like this:

• • When a representative acts on a long-stock alert, the estimated forward-looking POS impact is $270 per instance, measured over the following 28 days against a matched cohort of stores where the same action did not occur.

• • Approximately 400 stores in a major grocery banner are in scope.

• • If 10% of stores carry long stock after a promotion and representatives resolve half of those, that comes to roughly $5,000 per promotion.

• • Across 20 promotions a year, that is approximately $100,000 in annual benefit from a single coaching action, in that banner

That matters more when you consider that roughly 25 cents on every dollar of promotional activity goes into trade spend. Improving execution against that spend moves one of the largest lines in your P&L.

It is also worth saying how we got there. The $270 impact is measured against a matched cohort over the following 28 days, not read off a simple before-and-after chart. That measurement happens in stage five, and it is what lets us stand behind the results from stage three.

Coaching at the Assortment Level

Coaching also goes beyond exceptions. A leading confectionery and snacks manufacturer in Mexico applied the same principle to assortment.

RDI’s Must Stock List of 1 used machine learning, predictive analytics, store clustering, historical sales-in data, demographics, geography, and comparison against similar successful stores to build a unique must-stock list for each individual outlet. The representative then used that recommendation to show the store owner which underperforming products to swap out for higher-potential ones, backed by evidence from that store and others like it.

The pilot delivered sales uplift of approximately 3.5% to 6.5% in pilot stores, averaging a little over 4.2%.

What This Means for Your Field Team

The Coach stage takes data and turns it into decisions. Over time, those decisions build capability in the field team. Once every action has a value attached, teams can decide what comes first, measure the results, and build a business case by stacking up use cases that each carry a number.

Next in the series is Pitch, covering why the same fact lands differently in every store and how to tailor the message for each one at scale.

Sam Barclay is Chief Growth Officer at StayinFront. If you would like to know which eight alerts would bring your business the most value, and what each one is worth, we can model that using your own data. Get in touch.

Know More. Do More. Sell More.