Sales Beat Planning and Optimization

Discover how SenseiAlgo's routing engine improves sales efficiency, reduces costs, and ensures optimal service levels. Our solution addresses common challenges in beat planning and delivers significant results.

4/13/20242 min read

“Sales Beat Plan” or “Permanent Journey Plan” is a day level sales route plan for field sales & marketing executives to visit several stores at a pre-defined frequency. Visits are necessary to handle order collection, visual merchandising and competitor analysis.

Typical problems faced in Beat optimization are

  1. Under-utilized salesmen/marketing executives 

  1. Long and cumbersome beats 

  1. Overlap in salesmen routes 

The goal of optimizing the sales beats are as follows:

  1. To have the right service levels at each retail outlet.

  1. Ensure that every outlet is serviced by the right person on the right day at the right time.

  1. To generate the most ideal beat size (the most optimal number of outlets within a beat) keeping the best possible mix of outlet types.

  1. Sequence in which, the outlets in every beat would be visited. Mostly this indicates the need of a cluster with minimal back and forth, travel time and distance.

Additionally, beat planning needs to consider other business specific parameters like:

  • Experience of the salesman in selling the product.

  • Previous performance of the sales personnel (The tendency of the store to re-order increases due to familiarity with the salesman)



Solution:

SenseiAlgo’s Routing engine handles constraints like geographical proximity, variable driving speeds, traffic conditions, outlet availability etc. The engine ensures that the same outlet is not visited by any two salesmen on the same day (known as “mirror beats”). It also ensures that the volume sold on a given day is within the range that can be delivered during the distribution cycle and is fair across the week.

Our routing engine delivers significant advantages over manual methods for sales beat planning. An overall productivity of 20 to 30% can be targeted for medium to large orgs (sales team or vehicle fleet size 50 and above).

Key results

a. 90% reduction in beat planning time

b. 20-25% reduction in delivery costs

c. 10-15% increase in serviceability ratio

Table 1: Sample use case, FMCG Sales Beats