Beat planning for a small distributor

A beat is the list of shops one salesman visits on one day. A beat plan is those lists for the whole week, for every salesman. It is the least glamorous document in a distribution business and the one that decides most of the revenue, because a shop that nobody walked into on Tuesday did not buy anything on Tuesday.

Most small distributors have a beat plan in the sense that the salesmen “know their areas”. That is not the same thing, and the difference shows up the first week somebody is on leave.

The rule everything else hangs on

The same shop is visited on the same day, every week.

Not roughly. Not usually. The shopkeeper should be able to say “the Mulberry man comes on Thursday” and be right every Thursday. This one discipline buys you three things at once:

• The shopkeeper starts saving his order for your visit instead of picking up a stopgap from the wholesaler.
• He has money ready on the day he expects you, which does more for collections than any reminder.
• You can tell coverage from sales. If Thursday’s shops are down this week, that is information. If the days move around, it is noise.

A beat plan that changes week to week is not a plan, it is a route the salesman is improvising, and the first shops to fall off it are the small, far ones — the exact shops a competitor is happy to pick up.

How many outlets in a day

There is no universal number, but the shape is well known. Density is what decides it:

• A tight town market — shops in a row, on foot — supports the highest count, because walking time is almost nil.
• A mixed urban beat on a two-wheeler supports fewer, since every call includes a ride and a parking.
• A rural beat with villages ten kilometres apart supports the fewest, and the plan lives or dies on the sequence.

Rather than copy someone else’s number, measure your own: take one salesman, one normal day, and record the time of the first and last bill and how many shops he actually entered. That gives you minutes per call including travel. Divide the working day by it. That is your real capacity, and it is usually lower than the number in the owner’s head.

Then plan to about eighty per cent of it. A beat packed to capacity has no room for the day a shutter is down or a shopkeeper wants to argue about a damaged case, and the shops at the end of the list are the ones that get dropped.

Building the plan, once

1. List every outlet. Name, area, phone, and whether they buy weekly or fortnightly. Include the ones you stopped visiting — you are deciding about them, not ignoring them.
2. Cluster by geography, not by importance. Draw the town on paper if you have to. Shops that are near each other belong on the same day; a big outlet does not deserve its own trip across town.
3. Assign each cluster a day. Six working days, six clusters per salesman. Fortnightly outlets get alternate weeks on their cluster day, never a different day.
4. Sequence within the day. Start at the far end and work back toward the godown. A salesman who ends far away starts skipping the last three shops, and he will not tell you which three.
5. Balance the load. Count outlets and expected value per day. A Monday with twice Wednesday’s work is a Monday that overruns every week.
6. Write it down and give it to them. On paper, in the app, on the wall — but written, and the same copy for everyone.

The local closed day

Nearly every market town has a weekly holiday when most shutters are down, and it is not the same day in the next town. Plan a beat onto it and you have scheduled a salesman to drive out and find nothing open. Ask the salesmen — they know — and keep those days for the beats that are unaffected, for collections, or for the outlets that open anyway.

Four numbers, checked weekly

A beat plan is only as good as the review. These four take ten minutes and catch nearly everything:

• Calls made. How many of the planned shops were actually visited. Under about ninety per cent, week after week, means the beat is too big or the sequence is wrong.
• Productive calls. How many of those visits produced a bill. A visited-but-did-not-buy shop is not a failure once; it is a problem three weeks running.
• Lines per bill. How many different products the average shop took. This is the number that moves when a salesman is selling rather than order-taking, and it moves before revenue does.
• Shops not billed in 30 days. The quiet list. These are outlets you still count as customers and no longer sell to, and they are usually the first sign that a competitor got the beat right.

Look at all four by salesman and by day, not just as a total. A total hides the one beat that stopped working.

Why good beat plans decay

• New shops get added wherever convenient instead of into the cluster that owns their area, and within a year the days overlap.
• A salesman leaves and his beats get split across whoever is available, on whatever day suits them.
• Nobody removes closed shops, so coverage looks worse than it is and the numbers stop being trusted.
• The plan lives in one person’s head — usually the senior salesman’s — which is fine until the week he is not there.

The fix for all four is the same: the plan is a document the office owns, not a habit the field remembers.

What software should do about it

The useful thing software does here is small and specific: it puts today’s list on the salesman’s phone in the sequence you set, and it records which of those shops actually got billed. Everything else — coverage, productive calls, the thirty-day quiet list — falls out of those two facts.

In Mulberry Sales, shops are assigned to day-lists, the salesman opens the app and sees only today’s shops, and the day-end summary shows what was billed against what was planned. Pair that with the right selling model for your beats and the route stops being something you hope is happening.