Many businesses struggle to truly harness the power of their big data. Imagine manufacturers drowning in sales figures, healthcare providers overwhelmed by HCP records, or oil companies clinging blindly to outdated maintenance & compliance schedules at fuel stations. In these turbulent waters, valuable insights often get lost, leaving organizations adrift in a sea of unutilized potential.

This is where generative AI, the rising tide of intelligent automation, emerges as a life preserver. By weaving machine learning, natural language processing, and even creative flair into its fabric, generative AI can transform your data from a chaotic storm into a navigable ocean teeming with actionable intelligence.

The Role of Generative AI in FMCG Industry

Extract Consumer Purchasing Patterns

The FMCG sector, characterized by its vast consumer base and rapid turnover of products, generates enormous amounts of data daily. This data, ranging from consumer purchasing patterns to supply chain logistics, holds immense potential for companies willing to delve into its depths.

For instance, consider a global confectionery company that uses big data to analyze consumer preferences across different regions. By identifying trending flavours and packaging preferences, a company can introduce targeted product variations, resulting in a significant boost in market share.

Optimizing Raw Material Procurement

Similarly, big data aids in supply chain optimization. An FMCG giant that uses predictive analytics to foresee demand surges in certain products would be enabled to streamline their inventory and reduce product expiries. That will enhance the sustainability efforts and profitability.

Perishable goods, which are common in the FMCG sector, have a limited shelf life. Predictive analytics allows a company to align its supply chain processes with the expected shelf life of products, ensuring that they reach the consumers while within their best consumption period.

Create Advertising & Marketing Campaigns

Generative AI takes big data analysis a step further. It not only interprets existing data but also generates new data models to simulate various market scenarios. This ability is particularly beneficial in the FMCG sector for testing marketing campaigns, predicting consumer behaviour, and optimizing product distribution.

For example, AI can simulate the impact of a new advertising campaign on sales across different demographics, providing FMCG companies with valuable insights to tailor their marketing strategies effectively.

Conclusion

The true power of big data lies in how it’s used. With the adoption of generative AI, FMCG companies can transform raw data into actionable insights. This transformation is key to staying ahead in the highly competitive and ever-evolving FMCG market.

The data deluge isn’t just a metaphorical storm anymore – it’s a constant downpour shaping the business landscape. Companies that stand idly by, hoping for an umbrella, will find themselves swept away. But for those who embrace the flood, generative AI becomes the ark: navigating the turbulent waters and steering towards a data-driven destiny.

References:

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/whats-the-future-of-generative-ai-an-early-view-in-15-charts#/

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/get-creative-with-generative-ai-in-performance-max/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/benefits-best-practices-procurement-data-analysis-precoro/

As a revolutionary salesforce automation tool, Salesflo has played a transformative role for numerous local and multinational companies, empowering businesses to enhance sales efficiency and optimize field force performance. Renowned for its delightful user experience, scalability, and reliability, Salesflo stands out as a leading name in the industry, offering a cutting-edge Field Force Performance Enhancement Ecosystem.

The acknowledgement as a finalist in the data-driven award categories, featuring meticulous metrics and third-party auditing by Canalys, highlights Salesflo’s outstanding performance and significant contribution to the AWS community. This recognition not only reflects Salesflo’s commitment to specialization, innovation, and collaboration but also marks a noteworthy milestone in its journey to provide innovative digital solutions for businesses.

Continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and collaboration, Salesflo remains a committed leader in the industry, dedicated to delivering advanced solutions that drive efficiency, excellence, and success for its clients. To unlock your sales potential, Book a demo with us!

Are You Aligned to Achieve?

Identifying the right SaaS metrics helps startups determine how they are performing against industry standards, which in turn helps them grow steadily. These help businesses stay afloat and thrive in the booming industry.

SaaS Metrics Every Company Must Undertake

• Churn Rate
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Annual Contract Value (ACV)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)

Churn Rate

The churn rate is the percentage of customers left from the total number of customers at a specific time. It’s an essential tool for SaaS companies and investors. Because it gives insight into whether the company is growing or shrinking over time. If your churn rate is increasing, you need to take action fast. Such as lowering prices or offering more value to return your lost customers. On the flip side, if your churn rate decreases, you’re getting positive word-of-mouth, and your product/service is improving. While Churn rates vary across businesses, to streamline SaaS growth, businesses are recommended to maintain an average churn rate between 3% and 8%, considering their industry benchmark.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is one of the most critical SaaS metrics mainly because the entire business model revolves around the lifetime value of the customers. The CAC helps an organization examine the amount spent on acquiring an ideal customer during customer development. This KPI helps determine the effort an organization needs to put in to get new clients. If an organization’s CAC is high, it will have significant expenses in the beginning. If, however, it is low, the business will likely become profitable relatively soon.

Annual Contract Value (ACV)

The total revenue is generated by a customer in a given year, regardless of the renewal date. Although ACV is not always the sole contributor to revenue, it is an important metric that determines an annualized revenue measurement, which means it is the sum of all monthly recurring revenue that the company has earned over the contract term (up to 24 months). There are several ways to calculate ACV, but they all involve dividing annual sales by the contract term or some multiple of it. In other words, ACV = Annual Sales / Months in Term.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the average net profit per user over the length of their relationship with any business. The CLV metric is often used to determine how much revenue a customer will bring in during their tenure. Therefore, organizations must consider this an integral factor since SaaS businesses have a single source of revenue regarding their sales, marketing, and product management processes. The longer a customer stays around, the more revenue they will likely generate for the company. Fortunately, an organization can measure CLV in multiple ways, depending on what works best for the company.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

The most critical metrics of a SaaS company are those which indicate the business’s health. It is typically the most sought-after metric adopted by subscription-based organizations to measure growth. ARR is one of the most desirable ways to measure growth in a SaaS company because it considers both; new sales and the renewal of existing customers. With this, it is more indicative of the amount of money an organization makes than MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) or the LTV (Customer Lifetime Value). If ARR showcases steady growth over time, significantly if it is growing faster than the customer acquisition costs, then this indicates that the business is performing reasonably well.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is among the most important metrics a SaaS company should track. It represents the revenue earned from customers on an ongoing basis, as opposed to a one-time transaction. Moreover, it can be expressed in terms of the monthly contract value, annual contract value, or total revenue. Apparently, it is easy for an organization to predict its future cash flow considering the percentage of recurring or long-term clients. Furthermore, it also leverages growth. If, for instance, the MRR of an organization is $15,000 per month and they aim at growing it by 20% the following year. For this, the organization would need their MRR to increase by $3,000 per month over the next 12 months as per calculation: ($30k/12 = $2,500/month).

Average Revenue per Account (ARPA)

The average revenue per account (ARPA) is another valuable metric when tracking a SaaS-based company’s growth. Specifically, this metric is used in SaaS to measure the size of a customer’s typical monthly revenue. ARPA measures the gross revenue from cumulative customers rather than per customer. So, the metric is calculated by adding all of the (MRR) across all accounts and dividing them by the total number of accounts. Using this, SaaS companies can better assess the amount of money they make from their average customer. Additionally, it can be used to compare revenues earned through different products or segments within the same company.

Building the Future for B2B SaaS Companies

B2B SaaS companies are responsible for defining and analyzing multiple metrics that any company can assess for growth and sustainability in this competitive niche. Following that, understanding, assessing, and improving the metrics mentioned above will only promise organizational growth to keep businesses growing, even if it is not drastic; minor improvements are likely to contribute to organizational health and overall progress.

It is pertinent to mention that retail technology has massively revolutionized sales and distribution management. However, the results in enhanced customer experiences, improved operational efficiency, and sales force effectiveness allowing automated operations. The penetration of online retail has already been increasingly high due to its growing trend fostered by investments in apps, the introduction & application of new tools, and increasing customer demand.

Evolutionary Updates in the Market

• Retail Experiences
• Branding of Product
• Marketing Evolutions
• Omni-channel Experience
• Consumer Culture Change
• Customer Interest Divided
• Shopping Malls Get Updated
• Cash Flow and Balance Check

These are some evolutionary fact which has a significant impact on the market. As the evolution made not only on retail but also many other major things will change, keep in mind.

Evolution of Market

The industry has been bubbling at the forefront of this change, with sales & distribution becoming increasingly internet-driven. Such unprecedented evolutions have encouraged retailers to acknowledge the importance of technology moving forward.

Ever since, the universally radical disruption caused due to the pandemic has plagued the supply chain. While with inevitable inefficiencies, most retailers worldwide have become forced to consider. How ill-equipped they presently are while struggling to be at par with customer demand during such taxing times.

Technological innovation has allowed retailers & business models to engage multi-dimensionally with their customers. Matter of fact by also offers genuinely personalized and unique retail experiences. Amid this, numerous brands are racing to harness intelligence. So, insights make customer experiences more human, personalized, and profitable. With this, the world keeps digging deeper because there’s more than meets the eye!

The roots and the steep cuts in sales & distribution run deep, leaving retailers struggling with fragmented and siloed workflow functions. The retailers, however, don’t wish to abandon their legacy systems as it would require them to feed the adoption with massive investments and substantial organizational change.

What Retail Industry Needs?

The retail industry needs an overarching solution that implements every system and unlocks its full potential. This was when retailers realized there was a need for them to deploy Sales and Distribution management. Additionally, they provide real-time insights for better decision-making to ensure highly efficient supply chains that are agile and measurable.

Choose Salesflo for Your Business Growth

Owing to necessitate is like future technological trends. Salesflo provides its clients with a best-in-class integrated solution for distribution management. Furthermore, to better manage trade channels across traditional, modern, and urban stores through enhanced integrations.

B2B Sales and Distribution

Aside from all the above, we are a 100% cloud-based, B2B Sales and Distribution leading software platform. It supports the sales management system through enhanced integrations primarily for FMCGs. Although, followed by service sectors (banking), pharmaceuticals & other relevant industries in Pakistan.

Therefore, we offer our customers digital solutions for sales & distribution with a broad range of automated services.

Banking in Pakistan

In 75 years, banking in Pakistan has come a long way. It has battled nationalization to privatization and everything in between. However, so far, we have been far behind in updating core banking operations and systems. The reason for this is that the technology used in the banking sector is the result of years of innovation to ONLY meet the customer’s immediate needs that too needs some work. On the other hand, this has resulted in silo-ed operations being used for various banking services; like, transactions, loan accounts, internet banking etc. These silo-ed systems are not ideal for the digital age where technology-based Fin-Tech startups are giving competition to not just banking but to the internal operations of the banks as well. Our systems unfortunately are not forward on core operations of a bank’s substantial workforce.

External Factors

The biggest external impact on businesses in the 21st century has been none other than Covid-19. The pandemic has had huge ramifications on the banking sector across the world – Pakistan is no exception. It has exposed digital shortcomings and lack of innovation across the industry for example:

• Impacted workflow
• Managing customer expectations
• Lack of streamlining of internal systems

Why Operation Innovation?

Well, apart from the fact that it’s high time we “get with the times”, banks can roll out effortless digital passages by automating their workflows and removing any manual intervention. Moreover, as a large chunk of a bank’s annual budget is consumed by operations, a digital makeover would provide a much-needed respite. Operational innovation offers other advantages as well:

• It provides the capacity to increase revenues.
• Growth in revenue is possible by providing better and differentiated products and services for customers.
• The operational costs that a bank will save because of tech intervention can be reapplied to digital innovation

How to Rise to the Challenge

The State Bank of Pakistan has introduced a framework for banks to set up complete digital accounts that will provide all banking services from opening a new account to mobile banking to deposit and lending. Initiatives like these will not only force our banks to adopt a sturdy technological infrastructure for its core operations but will also drive them to enforce effective workflow strategies and data management.

Listen Up!

Technological innovation and automation Initiatives like these will prove pivotal in aiding banks to seamlessly implement end-to-end digital journeys but the right tools will help employees to readily assist customers on the best financial products and will provide a more tailored and appealing platform through which business can operate. A tool by Salesflo called, “Salesflo Engage” can help executives do just that and then some. This tool is designed to create better workflows and optimise operations and it was created keeping digitising salesforce in mind. All in all, managers must make use of such tools to accommodate their customers and deliver operational innovation.

We’re forever committed to helping you get the best out of your business; with the biggest and most credible Sales and Distribution performance enhancement solution in Pakistan.

Join the Salesflo community now, be in charge of your business! Book a demo today!