Get Started with Advanced Activity Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the basics of advanced activity management and why it’s important.
- Explain the key concepts of activity management.
Activity Management at Alpine Group
Gustavo De Luca is a sales manager at Alpine Group Nutrition and Beverage. He manages the sales and promotions for Alpine Group’s snack and beverage products across Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) stores in the USA. Chantelle Johnson, a field sales rep in Gustavo’s team, carries out store visits and audits in the NTO stores.
Gustavo is looking to evaluate if promotions are running correctly in the stores that Chantelle visits. He plans various field activities to ensure she’s consistently checking listing compliance on distribution, facings, and prices.
Gustavo also wants Chantelle to conduct store audits regularly to take heed of out-of-stock scenarios and survey competitor products. So, Gustavo aims to prepare a list of standard audit questions that Chantelle can use during her store visits. Based on the provided answers to those questions, Gustavo plans to get more insights into the store, such as out-of-stock or share-of-shelf information for a product.
Chantelle is also looking forward to an easy way of managing her field activities. By conducting standard audits, she’s able to achieve her targets with regard to price and distribution compliance. The audits also help her evaluate the overall store stock situation and place orders based on those insights. Promotional activities help her ensure that promotional displays are compliant and the new products have correct price tags.
Fatima Daniels, the Salesforce admin for Alpine Group, introduces Gustavo to advanced activity management in CG Cloud. Gustavo can use advanced activity management to ensure promotional compliance and gather useful insights about the store visits.
In this module, follow Fatima and Gustavo as they explore the prerequisites, implementation, and creation of activity templates and activities.
Activity Management Basics
An activity is a list of questions and surveys used by sales reps to perform audits during store visits. For example, checking the number of shelves in a store. Managing activities ensures that important store visit tasks such as promotional compliance checks are conducted as required.
Displaying popular products in the store with the right price, at the right place is important for a consumer goods (CG) manufacturer. Manufacturers incur huge losses due to product out-of-stock situations. Hence the sales reps execute listing compliance checks on negotiated key performance indicators (KPI) like facings, price, and distribution.
Additionally, various store audits are executed regularly to ensure that the right sales and promotion strategies are in place. Other than the normal shelf placements, CG manufacturers also invest into secondary placements to increase product and brand awareness. Examples include point of sales (POS) like refrigerators and freezers.
Manufacturers also increase sales through promotional activities. Manufacturers lose huge amounts of money when promotions aren’t executed as planned, or when promoted products are out of stock. Additionally, they must execute promotional compliance checks to validate promotion compliance. For example, whether promotion displays are available and placed at the right place in the store.
Key Concepts of Activity Management
Fatima and Gustavo start by looking at a few key concepts of activity management.
Activity Types
The field activities performed by sales reps can be categorized into two broad types: standard activities and event-driven activities.
| Standard Activities | Event-Driven Activities |
|---|---|
|
|
Store and POS Checks
To ensure store and promotional compliance, the sales reps perform the following activities.
- Execute conditional audits with dynamic questions. Conditional audits are supported only on mobile devices and allow a maximum of 500 questions. Conditional questions provide guidance to the sales reps about the relevant questions to answer. This improves their productivity and efficiency, as they only answer relevant questions.
- Capture pictures for selected questions. For example, a picture of the POS is most useful when answering a question about the alignment or arrangement of the POS.
- Group all questions by activity or promotion so that the sales reps know the context of the questions. Grouping helps the sales reps gather the right information when conducting the survey.
- Perform audits at store or POS (secondary placement) level.
- Use gamification concepts, such as activity scoring to track performance progress. Activity scoring is set up while assigning job definition templates to activities. Each toggle-type question has a score assigned to it. Based on the selected response, the score of the question is determined. This feature helps to promote user adoption.
- Add new questions dynamically. Although audits are predefined by the activity planner, the system allows the flexibility to add on-demand questions, if necessary.
- Improve the quality of questions by using preset responses from previous visits.
Conditional Questions
Activity management allows sales managers to set up conditional questions, which are dependent questions such that the response to the previous question determines the subsequent question. For example, let’s look at the following list of conditional questions.
- What is the type of POS available?
- If the selected POS type is fridge, are competitor brands present in it?
- If yes, what's the number of competitor brands present?
Conditional questions have the following advantages.
- Better sales rep experience as guidance is provided to the relevant questions.
- Improved audit quality as user can provide an answer only when the condition is satisfied.
Product Surveys
Product surveys ensure product compliance at the store level in an efficient way. Activity management facilitates the following product survey solutions.
- Supports exception reporting based on targets or historical values. This feature provides live reporting in the offline mode based on the survey responses. The sales reps need not perform syncs to the online app or use any other apps to generate this live report.
- Provides matrix view for efficient data capture. The survey responses are captured in the matrix view itself and there’s no need to navigate to the detail view. This increases the productivity and efficiency of the sales reps. CG Cloud supports a maximum of eight matrix columns.
- Includes search and filter options that enhance usability by helping the sales reps identify the relevant products to audit.
- Allows barcode scanning. Scanning the barcode leads the sales reps to the relevant product and manual identification of the product isn’t required.
- Allows adding new products. If products that weren’t included in the standard listing are found on the shelves, the sales reps can add them to the product survey.
- Allows grouping all questions by activity or promotion. Grouping helps the sales reps know the context of the question. It enables them with the right information when conducting surveys.
Historical Values for Questions and Surveys
For the questions and surveys available in the CG Cloud offline mobile app, the responses can be preset with historical values, which are essentially the responses from the previous visits. This helps to guide the sales reps better while answering these questions or surveys.
Product Determination for Surveys
Products can be determined from the Product Assortment or Listings page. The search feature is based on the first hit algorithm. Product assortments have accounts assigned to them. As per the first hit algorithm, CG Cloud first tries to find an assortment for the store. If no assortment is found, it searches for an assortment for its parent account. This process continues until either an assortment is found or no parent account remains in the hierarchy.
Special products can be assigned to an activity related to a promotion. Products can also be added manually.
Target Values for Surveys
Survey responses can be preset with target values. The target value is determined on the basis of the target value column. CG Cloud fetches the corresponding value from the Product Assortment page based on the product category and listing module.
Preset responses enhance the productivity and efficiency of the sales reps as the survey values are already pre-populated. The sales reps alter the responses in the app only when there’s a deviation from the intended target.
Customer Assignments
One or more customers or customer sets can be assigned to an activity. While creating an activity template if you select the Consider Customer checkbox, standard activities appear only in the visits created for the customers assigned to the activity. If you don’t select the checkbox, standard activities appear in the visits created for all customers.
The customer sets can be created manually or through segmentation rules. The existing customer sets can be imported from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Moving On
In this unit, Fatima learned about the basics of activity management and a few key concepts. In the next unit, join Fatima as she explores the prerequisites and implementation steps for activity management.