Automation in sales and distribution channels: Best practices and application in Indian context

Abstract

This report is divided into four parts. First part is the literature review that was done as the starting point for the report. We used reputed research journals with peer reviewed articles. During our literature review, our main objective was to learn about ‘Automation in sales and distribution function’ from various aspects. We used aspects like the objective of the company, need of the client, structure of the automation used, advantages and disadvantages, etc. The learnings from various articles regarding these aspects were tabulated. The second part that we did was the review of SFA software vendors. SFA software vendors are the seller of automation technologies. So, we wanted to learn about what technologies are there in SFA and what value proposition software vendors are providing. Thus, we studied top 5 most popular SFA software vendors in India, their value offerings, technical description and customer reviews; this gave us a basic idea about different types of SFA software available in the market. Next part of our work consists of direct interviews with Industry users. First, we made a questionnaire regarding what information we want from the respondents. Our questions were based on the findings from the articles with we wanted to confirm from the industry users. We interviewed employees from 11 companies from the various sector and complied learnings from the interviews. Last part is about learnings and recommendations. For conclusion, we compared learnings from all three analyses that we have completed earlier: Literature, SFA vendors, and SFA users. And we tried to find anomalies between these learning, which are considered as the gap in the automation sector in the Indian context. Based on these gaps we tried to provide recommendations on the solutions that can be useful in the Indian context. Based on our learnings we gave four recommendations. The first recommendation is directed towards researcher pointing out gaps that we found during our literature survey. Then we gave recommendations on aspects of communication, training, incentive and organisation structure. All these recommendations are directed towards bridging the gap between literature and industry requirements.