Sales management used to be a straightforward process focused solely on tracking stocked and sold products. However, with the evolving sales channels, the management process has also become more dynamic. Traditionally, sales management involved all factors directly related to sales.
Organizations typically manage their sales channels in two steps: Primary Sales and Secondary Sales. Handling both manually is challenging and prone to errors. To properly manage both sales channels, a solution to this chicken-and-egg problem, companies are now looking for sales automation software.
For any business, sales automation software plays an important role that is looking to increase productivity and optimize their profitability. While it may sound complicated, companies use sales automation software to automate and monitor primary and secondary sales activities which include stock of product and inventory management, order management and interaction between the field sales force and different sales points. In order to enhance profitability, this is the phase where companies need to have high productivity.
What Are Primary and Secondary Sales:
Primary sales: The sale made by a company to the distributor is called primary sales.it contributes to the company’s revenue and profit, so companies main focus is to increase primary sales.
Secondary sales: The sale made by the distributor to the retailer is called secondary sales. In this transaction, the distributor keeps a profit margin and sells the product at the dealer’s price.
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Challenges in managing Primary sales:
At the beginning of a sales process, primary sales automation takes place. Products are sent from the manufacturer’s warehouse to the dealer’s inventory in primary sales. In the absence of a systematic approach, the distribution channel is hampered.
- In general, the company having more distribution channels becomes very challenging to manage the distribution process; so, keeping track of primary sales gets more difficult.
- Little to no protocols for tracking and measuring primary sales data over a longer period of time, so there is no way to analyze sales and rectify the weaknesses.
- While handling the primary sales, no forecasting of product stock updates is a major issue. Due to no reporting system of secondary sales from the dealer’s end this issue arises.
- Insufficient or incorrect information about secondary sales longing for higher inventory handling time increases financial risk for manufacturers who are unable to forecast stock levels accurately.
- Inventory management becomes difficult as well because there are no records of the movement of goods between various levels of the supply chain.
- A lack of control in managing secondary sales also results in bad management of primary sales.
Challenges in managing Secondary sales:
The challenges of managing secondary sales are important and costly. With the growth in a company’s distribution network, the challenges of determining product availability across channels become exponentially more difficult with each new channel added to a company’s supply chain.
- Lack or poor visibility in secondary sales, especially with retailers due to high demand and low supply during the holiday season.
- As a result, it becomes difficult to keep track of inventory and product stock.
- There is challenges with product stocking management because the company may have to face shortage due to insufficient inventory.
- With the increase in the number of sales reps in different distribution points, manual coordination is a pain in the neck for any supply chain network
- Lack of common or central database and unorganized supply chain operations lead to revenue loss
- No market survey or poor market research data from the field reps can directly communicate with higher authorities
- Secondary sales also gets affected due to lack of visibility in trade promotional campaigns
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The Significance of Sales Management in Business
Sales management is the pivotal core of every business enterprise, and an imperfectly organized process can result in significant profit losses. Smooth cooperation of sales planning, distribution management, and order management is necessary, akin to the precision of a well-tuned clock.
Efficiency Measurement in Distribution Channels:
Sales managers deliver an important role in harnessing the most profitable sales areas, figuring out the optimal distributors and dealers, and evaluating the complete efficiency of the entire process.
Sales Department Oversight
Efficient sales management includes forming superior strategies, introducing motivation systems for team members, assessing their performance thoroughly, and embracing their active participation in successfully achieving the company’s committed goals.
Adjustment of the sales structure
The sales structure functions as a complicated organism, encompassing several departments like logistics, inventory, and delivery. Evaluating and fine-tuning such components are important to systematic sales management, including result assessments, effective improvement strategy, and error correction.
Sales Organization
A successful sales management strategy depends on the challenging organization of unnecessary elements. Such involves ensuring ample stock during peak seasons, predicting future sales for raw materials, and managing a market presence for sales representatives.
How to get rid of those challenges?
In the business world, all are well aware that the sales department helps to keep a business operational, but there are many more reasons to be concerned with how they are managed for better output. Sales challenges can lead to complexity between departments and companies, decrease productivity due to understaffing or overworking existing staff, negatively affect the morale and work ethic of the workforce, resulting in low morale among customers, and cause a decrease in sales.
How SalesBabu DMS can help you automate your primary sales:
Manage your distributor network : It allows you to manage your distributor network centrally, with a single view of all orders, inventory, and payments. It can be used to generate leads, track sales performance, and provide support to your distributors.
Automate order processing : It automates the order processing process, from receiving orders from distributors to generating invoices and shipping goods. This helps in saving time and reducing errors.
Track inventory in real time : It tracks inventory levels in real time across your entire supply chain. It gives us visibility into stock levels at all times and helps us to avoid stockouts.
Generate reports : It has lots of reports that help you to track your sales performance, identify areas for improvement, and make better business decisions.
How SalesBabu DMS can help you automate your secondary sales:
Manage your sales team : It helps you manage your sales team more effectively by providing real-time visibility into their performance. You can use the DMS to track their visits, orders, and sales data.
Automate order taking : It allows your sales reps to take orders from retailers directly through the app. This removes the need for manual order taking and reduces errors.
Automate Your Primary And Secondary Sales With SalesBabu DMS
Primary and secondary sales are both critical pillars for a company’s survival, yet they are often unmanaged in many organizations. Whenever we deal with sales challenges, we are expected to find solutions that reduce the pain. Also, little attention is given to transforming the traditional sales management processes and implementing automation to streamline both sales and distribution channels.—
Primary Sales:
A cloud-based platform is used by the manufacturer’s end to manage primary sales, which is about balancing the movement of goods between dealer and manufacturer. Dealers use this app to send the order to the manufacturer’s end and the respective manufacturer or anyone who is responsible from the company’s end receives the order.
Then goods are prepared for dispatch and receive cash/ cheque and finally delivers the product to the dealer’s end. SalesBabu DMS make the whole process visible and every cash flow is monitored through it. Our online DMS solution also helps to manage inventory and reduce product departure time.
Secondary Sales:
A company mainly depends on secondary sales. If there are no secondary sales dealers or distributors will not buy products as a company won’t be able to make primary sales. So, it will end up with no revenue.
To manage secondary sales, the SalesBabu app monitors all the activities of the field force and helps to integrate with primary sales. SalesBabu tracks things in the following sequence:
- The sales reps visit the market or retail outlets, give check-in and mark that outlet in the app
- Along with promotional discounts shows products and details through the app to retailers
- Makes an invoice with the help of the app after taking an order and sends it to the distributor’s end
- When payment is done, it is also notified and also shows the dues that are left
Every time, the circle continues whenever a secondary sale is made for every other retail outlet.
Conclusion
The challenges in managing primary and secondary sales can be overcome by using SalesBabu’s online distribution management system. This collects data from manufacturers’ and dealers’ ends and helps to effortlessly manage stocks and updates them in real-time.
It also collaborates between sales reps and manufacturing companies to enhance their secondary sales efficiency and boost the company its desired revenue. Our cloud-based DMS takes care of your retail sales distribution channel by implementing automation in different sales stages. Therefore, our tool helps to manage your sales operation in every way.
