Botree SFA

An organization’s salesforce is truly its backbone since it generates revenues and allows the company to grow over time. A great salesforce can make it significantly easier for an organization to scale up. No matter how good your product or service is, if your sales team does not perform well on the field, all your product development and branding efforts go to waste.

Modern organizations, therefore, emphasise developing their sales teams and keeping track of their activities while on the field.

Though organizations now understand the need to empower their sales machinery, many struggle to find the technology. While certain applications allow remote monitoring of field agents, they completely ignore order and distribution management.

Thankfully, a new breed of applications empowers both organizations and sales executives, allowing them to have clear visibility of sales processes. This review will focus on — Botree Stocky Sales & Field Automation (SSFA) solution, which combines various cutting-edge technologies to improve oversight and control over sales processes.

Botree is a UniteFusion group company with an impressive track record of offering custom enterprise solutions for 20+ years. Its SSFA application is designed to bridge the gap between warehouses and buyers while offering a superior user experience to salespersons and company executives. 

The application covers multiple touchpoints and automates several processes related to sales, performance management, order management, market analysis, and reporting, which makes it a powerful tool for improving sales machinery and overall performance. Through this review, we will cover the following points:

• Introduction to Botree SSFA
• Key Features of Botree SSFA
• Our Final Verdict

So let’s get started, shall we?

Introduction to Botree SSFA

Botree’s Stocky Sales & Field Automation (SSFA) solution is an advanced distribution management and sales force automation system designed to manage and monitor sales.

It combines several elements of supply chain management with artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the user experience of salespersons and automate transactions between warehouses and shoppers. 

Botree SSFA is designed to automate multiple touchpoints between companies and their customers, including distributors, retailers, stockists, and more. The application is created for both salespersons visiting retailers and management personnel overseeing sales activities, which is why it has two user group personas.

The Stocky Sales & Field Automation (SSFA) solution comes with a dedicated android mobile app that allows you to add distributors, sub-stockists, distributor salespersons, and company salespersons.

SSFA enables you to configure multiple use cases/scenarios and group on-field sales executives and company users separately. Further, you can configure access rights and screens for user groups and roles, map users, and choose the modules visible to user groups they can access via mobile devices.

Botree SSFA mobile app is highly configurable, allowing users different access based on their organizational role. For example, from a managerial perspective, it allows company users to track the performance of their salespersons and outlets, view orders, and monitor their productivity.

In addition, the application offers various metrics related to their performance, incentives, attendance, targets, success rates, and more for salespersons.

The SSFA app is designed to offer salespersons clear visibility into their targets and achievements. Moreover, it informs them about their monthly and daily targets, the required rate of success, targets achieved, and sales incentives by value and parameter levels.

Additionally, it allows them to view their performance and incentive history and view tasks, outlets, and routes assigned to them in real time. 

Now that we know what Botree SSFA is let’s look at its key features to understand why it is a must-have for any enterprise wanting to monitor and organize its salesforce and boost its revenues.

Key Features of Botree SSFA

Outlet Management

With Botree SSFA, salespersons can track their performance with respect to each outlet they cater to and view their day-wise and week-wise contributions.

They can also switch between volume and value-based targets according to their needs and convenience. The mobile app also allows salespersons to check trend information and compare their current and previous performance.

Botree SSFA enables salespersons to view information about both their billed and unbilled outlets for the last three months. They can also view the markets assigned to them and check how they have fared with respect to each of them.

Further, they can view details of orders that are pending, orders for which delivery is pending, and cancelled orders. 

The SSFA mobile app lets your salespersons add new outlets and register them. It also has an OTP system that verifies retailers to avoid duplication. Once a retailer provides their phone number, the system authenticates them and uses the number to notify them regarding orders.

Additionally, in the case of two different distributors sharing an outlet for product lines, Botree SSFA allows them to share the same number for smoother communications.

Outlet Geotagging

Typically, salespersons visit several outlets in multiple markets daily to achieve their sales targets. Botree SSFA allows geotagging of outlets for easy identification, discovery, and tracking. In addition, the system automatically captures the outlet involved when a salesperson tries to log in from it via geotagging, which paves the way for excellent location analytics.

Since sales supervisors can plan the outlet visits for their salespersons and assign different markets to them on different days of the week using the app, geotagging of outlets help them find out if any deviations have been made. 

The SSFA application also allows users to choose the markets they want to visit for a given day. The shops/outlets to be visited in the market are automatically populated within the app.

If a salesperson decides to visit a different market than they were assigned for the day, they can also choose them from a list and provide a reason for doing the same.

Outlet Visits

The Botree SSFA app enables salespeople to plan and organize their visits according to their convenience. Salespersons can choose how they want the outlets to appear from the assigned list of outlets to be visited.

The outlets associated with a salesperson for a day can be filtered based on the distance between outlets (foot route), alphabetically(A-Z), or based on the executive’s visit history (last 3 months, current month, etc.).

Salespersons can also filter outlets based on whether they are billed or unbilled. Moreover, since the application is integrated with Google Maps, they can view the distance of each outlet from another, allowing them to plan their visits better.

The application also has a wonderful colour-coding system for easy recognition of outlets, where billed outlets are shown in green, and un-invoiced outlets are highlighted in red.

Botree SSFA also makes it compulsory for salespersons to geotag outlets before making a sale, which allows company personnel to track each outlet in every market. Also, if a supervisor or sales officer decides to visit/accompany a salesperson on their outlet visit, they can be tagged using the application.

As mentioned earlier, company personnel can configure the data they want their salespersons to be able to view and edit. Thus, you can choose whether you would want your salesforce to be able to edit or not. SSFA also lets you check your agents’ coverage (number of weekly visits) and productivity (number of orders collected on visits).

Order Management

When a salesperson arrives at an outlet, Botree SSFA lets them view a snapshot of its statistics and value. You can also configure salespersons’ screens to pre-load previous orders of an outlet if repeat orders are involved. Additionally, you can choose the order in which products/orders are populated on the salesperson’s mobile app.

The SSFA app also allows your salespersons to filter orders by brands and products and has a colour-based configuration for choosing order categories. It also enables salespersons to view scheme details and tentative values of schemes.

Moreover, this intelligent system offers suggestions on the number of products to be ordered based on previous purchasing history. You can also configure the same manually through the system.

Botree SSFA enables salespersons to capture digital signatures from retailers on their mobile devices once orders are placed and help capture retailer feedback upon each sale. Further, it allows salespersons to set up merchandising competitions for brand promotions.

If an order is not procured, SSFA allows agents to add why they could not complete the visit into the system. In case a shop is closed, they can also click a picture of the same on their mobile phones and update them in the system.

Furthermore, the application also prompts your salespeople to collect outstanding, add details of cash or cheque transactions that have happened, and capture details of sales returns with photographs.

Advanced Agent Tracking

Botree SSFA allows you to track the performance and movements of each of your agents in real time. It lets you define activities and reporting guidelines for agents based on their products, markets, or outlets.

It offers company executives and managers a graphical view of their agents on the field (with respect to each market) and checks if sales have happened at their assigned outlets.

SSFA also boasts of a live market tracker that offers real-time information about agents in a market. It highlights agents in a market who have procured orders in green, agents with no sales for the day in red, and active agents with no orders in yellow within a map, which can be highly beneficial to managers.

In addition, the application allows you to review each salesperson’s daily activities, including their visits, collections, product break-up, and sale values. 

Even the agent attendance system in Botree SSFA is state-of-the-art. Not only is the attendance based on geotagging, but the application also has a geofencing feature that prevents agents from entering transaction details until they are within a 50-meter radius of the given outlet.

Dashboard

Botree SSFA offers a dedicated dashboard where company executives and managers can check the status and performance of each product line, channel, service level, and overall level. Once logged in, company executives can view real-time data about how their teams perform and drill down information day or week-wise.

Company executives can colour code products, mark items as out of stock, and configure the sequencing of products on salespersons’ mobile apps.

The mobile app can be configured centrally, allowing different teams to present information to their salespersons. It lets them directly message and notifies their agents via the app, preventing communication bottlenecks.

Reports

Besides capturing agents’ deviations from the route assigned and collating them in the form of reports, Botree SSFA also helps generate the following reports automatically:

• Time spent per outlet
• Coverage & Productivity per agent per day
• Jump Route Report
• DSR Start-time Report
• Time-Wise Order Report
• PJP Adherence Report
• Rural Activity Market Report
• Urban Market Report
• Van Sales Reports

 The above reports can also be mapped to specific users and user groups, allowing organizations to streamline their sales completely.

Apart from the above features, Botree SSFA will soon be adding image-analytics features in their app, allowing salespersons to capture photos of promotional campaigns and enabling the system to provide a score based on image sensing, facilitating better branding.

Our Final Verdict

Botree SSFA is an excellent application for modern enterprises looking to boost their sales figures and streamline their salesforce. It allows you to capture every beat of your sales activities without being physically present in outlets. Additionally, it helps you connect personally with your retailers and place orders with greater flexibility. 

SSFA has successfully mixed technologies like AI, machine learning, geotagging, and geofencing to create a unique app for salespersons and companies, empowering and enlightening them simultaneously.

Considering the advanced features and functionalities of the application, we are inclined to give it a ‘Perfect Ten’ in our review, recognizing that it can completely automate salesforce management and monitoring in the future. For more details, kindly reach out at contact@botree.co.in