Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Paramdeep Singh Anand: During the first half of 2010s there was a delicate bridge between automation and people. That was the 2G era. A clear divide was visible between brands who wanted full visibility of their salesmen, and sales force who were stuck with manual processes of recording and sharing sales data. At that time, our parent company Flick2Know Technologies was leading the QR code market. A brilliant service rendered rather too early for its time.
That’s when one of our clients, who has witnessed the tremendous advantages of sales automation, approached us with a request to automate their sales with our technology. We were up for the challenge. In those days, sales automation was a costly affair, limited to only big, multi-billion dollar brands. From building a nascent sales automation app to innovating hundreds of new features, launching analytics, gamification, beat mapping, quick visualization tools, distributor management system and so much more, we have come a long way in a short span of time. Today, we offer a vast number of products and services to over 500 brands in the CPG industry.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by FieldAssist
Paramdeep Singh Anand: We serve a vast array of stakeholders connected to sales in the CPG industry. Within it we have distributors, salesmen, sales managers, MIS managers, and executives among others. Starting with distributors who hold a big portion of a brand's primary sales, propel a brand’s market penetration, deliver retail orders and much more, we offer online and rural DMS (Distributor Management System). With our platform, distributors are able to place orders, manage inventory and invoices, fulfill secondary orders, raise and manage claims, execute schemes and so much more with absolute ease. While brands gain visibility of all these in real time.
If we talk about the salesmen, their automation needs have been lifted up with our vast range of offerings in SFA (Sales Force Automation), including insights on retail outlets they are visiting, beat route for the day and week, real-time performance insights, must-sell assortment, gamification, automated workflows and the list goes on.
For managers we have quick visualization tools, an analytics app and dashboard, and flexible trend reports among others to help them analyze their team’s, region’s, area’s, and zone’s performance seamlessly. With our list of offerings managers further gain intelligence to build strategies and plan for the future.
Our sales enablement and analytics solutions are also extended to modern trade where brands promote their products through in-store representatives. With our platform for modern trade, store representatives are able to record, maintain and manage inward and outward stocks, planograms, schemes, sales and so on.
That’s about technology. Our offerings, however, are way beyond technology. We are go-to partners for our customers to ideate, initiate and incorporate their go-to market strategies with real-time insights, business trends, analytics and intelligence. To fuel their GTM strategies, we offer innovative solutions that accelerate growth.
Great Companies: What makes FieldAssist different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Paramdeep Singh Anand:
We are not just vendors who offer technology, we are partners in growth who offer solutions, who power go-to market strategies of brands in the CPG industry. We understand every business has its own areas of challenges, issues and problems when it comes to post-manufacturing supply-chain. We work from the ground up to identify the root cause of these challenges and build a solution that drives success. Our range of solutions currently available have been innovated through close collaboration with our clients.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Paramdeep Singh Anand: Building products and solutions that are made for India, especially for the CPG industry is no easy feat. It takes deep market expertise, a lot of groundwork and grinding to meet the high-degree of varying needs of the market. And when you decide to scale up from one solution for one category of stakeholders to one-stop solution for the entire sales processes, connecting the entire CPG ecosystem, the challenges simply pile up. To top it, they are unlike any other for ready reference.
During early years of FieldAssist, as one of India’s only few SaaS companies, the biggest challenge we faced was overcoming and broadening the decades-old mindset of owning the software rather than renting it. That was followed by developing a Made for India technology solution. It was fairly early when we realised SaaS for India is different from its counterparts. For India, it was more of a DIFM, Do it for Me, than DIY, Do it Yourself. That fact is evolving in this decade though. The set of challenges are evolving too.
The challenge of broadening mindsets and innovating solutions has now moved to the distributor segment of the CPG ecosystem. Further, technology adoption and facilities in the rural section of the CPG industry, including for distributors, is still at its nascent stage. Leading to a disparity in broadband and mobile connectivity. Analysing the contrast between rural and urban, we have extended offline facilities that can be synced up at a later time of the day. To meet the evolving needs of the distributors we have expanded our capabilities to integrate a vast range of ERPs with our solution for a win-win situation. And the list goes on.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for FieldAssist?
Paramdeep Singh Anand: We are well on our way to become a powerhouse of innovation that empowers relationships and connects them across the CPG partner ecosystem. Our enterprise runs on challenges faced by CPG brands, and that’s our fuel. It’s these challenges that power our drive to collaborate and innovate for accelerating growth. We are already innovating and delivering solutions for leading brands in India, Middle East and Africa. In the coming years we are planning to add more thrust to our innovations with new-age technologies and bring more intelligence to the CPG brands across the globe.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Paramdeep Singh Anand: Think of scaling early on by building high performance teams and leveraging technology in your area of business to solve problems of your customers. And needless to say, keep learning.
Website : https://www.fieldassist.in/