Paul Writer launches SAP Think Tank , 
Video interview series with Head of Sales highlighting best practices
Devendra Chawla
President – Food Bazaar
Future Group
On the changing role of sales to adapt to the digital age…
See in the last 19-20 years from the time I started in sales and I started typically as an area sales executive, I’ve gone to shops and made sales calls myself. The typical FMCG 35 calls in a day, how many productive, what order have you booked. We used to go and check inventory at the general trade “ghirane ke dukhaan”, see how many stocks of which product are lying there, make an order, show the shopkeeper, come back to the distributor, the distributor will supply the next day, I think the world has totally changed. The number of SQs have increased, there is a proliferation of brands and the same distributor is carrying too many companies as well. More so that the consumers have totally moved to the digital space thanks to mobile and tablet. So now it’s like a backward… For sales what it means is that the consumers are watching everything online and on tablet and on mobile and they’re getting the offers and seeing which product is getting launched – what it means for the back-end i.e. the sales distribution channel is to get automated and digitally. So you will find the good companies already moving on handhelds, taking inventory on systems so a lot of technology has come in which earlier used to be a lot manual. I think that’s the big shift that has come.
“For sales what it means is that the consumers are watching everything online and on tablet and on mobile and they’re getting the offers and seeing which product is getting launched – what it means for the back-end i.e. the sales distribution channel is to get automated and digitally.”
