Tell us about BeatRoute and how it is changing the SAAS business?
BeatRoute is a sales enablement platform designed specifically for retail brands, which enables them to achieve their business goals through collaboration between their sales teams, channel partners, and customers.
As an industry-SaaS solution, we’re proud to say that we don’t require long and risky implementation cycles. Instead, we’re specifically built to address the challenges and nuances of the retail and distribution industry, using the latest capabilities such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in practical ways, without expecting customers to invest time and effort in translating these technologies for production use.
We focus on providing deep features and functionality to drive sales enablement, not just sales automation. Our solutions prioritize the readiness of features and use of the latest technology in a way that customers can easily plug and play. Retail brands are leaning towards industry SaaS solutions like ours, built for sales enablement that covers their entire Route-to-Market
Can you explain how BeatRoute’s sales enablement platform works?
BeatRoute’s sales enablement platform uses its proprietary Goal-Driven Sales Technology, which allows businesses to define their goals within the platform and leverage sales teams, distributors, retailers, and channel influencers to achieve those goals. This fosters a high-performance, goal-oriented culture within sales teams and promotes collaboration with channel partners and customers on a common digital platform for holistic sales transformation.
How was BeatRoute started and what is the vision behind building the brand?
I had earlier co-founded VitalWires, an SAP consulting firm. BeatRoute started as a product within VitalWires and became an independent startup in 2017.
We noticed customers either rely on point solutions or inhouse built solutions. Either ways given the workflows and problems that need to be solved, companies will run out of scalability options soon. Use of accelerator platforms solved the scalability issues but it takes risky projects just to get automation right. Contextual use of information to create business impact becomes another roadmap.
Our vision has been to offer a quick to deploy platform that brings the depth of industry vertical and takes the complexity of tech deployment out of equation. We want to make this option available to every retail and distribution brand in the world.
How does BeatRoute differ from other sales tracking and analytical software?
We are not a sales tracking and analytical software, even though we might have started as one. There are 2 reasons why we say that.
One, is that retail distribution is not just about enabling sales teams; there is an entire ecosystem that consists of sales teams, distributors, dealers, retailers and sometimes channel influencers which need to be enabled. By empowering this entire ecosystem and fostering deep collaboration between them through our platform, we have been able to empower brands to derive enhanced value from their Route-to-Market.
The second reason is that even if we solely look at sales team enablement, tracking itself is just a minor part of what needs to be done. Tracking can bring visibility into your sales execution, but that is just the first step in your sales transformation journey. The real value gets unlocked when you focus on driving sales growth levers such as selling higher ticket sizes, more lines, newer lines, more outlets and use your front-line executives and managers to start achieving your business goals, something that our proprietary Goal-Driven Sales Technology is built to do.
What specific features does BeatRoute offer to help companies achieve their sales goals?
In the early days of our journey, we first solved the challenge of sales tracking and visibility. Subsequently we built intelligence into our workflows to help the sales teams, channel partners and retailers perform at high efficiency.
With time, we realized that just visibility and workflows on their own do not lead to brands achieving their business goals. When we would speak to business leaders, they would tell us that they were satisfied with the tools that they were using. But when we asked them if they had achieved their business goals through the platform, the answer would most often be negative. In essence, there was a disconnect between the business goals of the brands and the platforms that they were using to run their Route-to-Market.
This led us to develop our unique Goal-Driven Sales Technology that enables brands to define their business goals within our platform, and guide their sales teams and channel partners to achieve those goals for the brand. We use various techniques such as input based gamification, identification of learning needs on specific skills and using artificial intelligence to help managers be problem solvers. It is a tech approach to solving sales behaviour problems, and we already have many testimonials from enterprise brands across India, Philippines and Indonesia who have achieved success with this technology.
Can you provide examples of how companies have successfully used BeatRoute to transform their sales processes?
BeatRoute is currently being used by more than 150 enterprise customers across the globe. All of them have adapted and are using BeatRoute according to their specialized sales processes and business goals.
For example, San Miguel Foods Corporation uses BeatRoute to ensure not just that nuances of their retail and distribution sales are all mapped well into sales execution workflows but their teams and distribution partners get contextual intelligence to transact more optimally and not go out of stock at retail outlets and sell the desired SKUs.
Similarly, JSW Paints, an emerging player in the Indian retail industry, has also adopted Industry SaaS platform for sales enablement to enhance its sales performance and customer engagement. It uses gamification that’s already built for distributed teams to drive higher productivity and inspire healthy competition among its sales reps. It uses WhatsApp channel connected with a mobile App to engage better with its dealers and drive relationships that are about mutual business growth.
By utilizing technology, the company is trying to differentiate itself in a market that is highly monopolistic in India historically. Technology that is allowing JSW to constantly be ahead of the game with fast upgrading characteristics of a SaaS solution built for their industry is proving to be a competitive differentiator.
Similarly, an oral care brand has been experimenting with direct digital connect with retailers to augment the physical visits of their sales reps and drive specific objectives at select stores. The company has long been investing in technology to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, which allows it to tailor its channel marketing efforts more effectively. Industry SaaS way of sales enablement has allowed it to experiment quickly with various techniques to test its hypothesis and build a process that works.
How does BeatRoute measure and track the success of its customers’ sales goals?
BeatRoute measures and tracks the success of its customers’ sales goals through key performance indicators (KPIs), sales data analysis, and monitoring of sales activities. These insights allow businesses to make data-driven decisions and refine their sales strategies to achieve their goals more effectively.
These KPIs are highly configurable and each brand would set up their KPIs according to their business goals and sales strategy. For example, if a brand has a goal of expanding into a new territory in the coming months, their KPIs would be around the number of successful store onboardings, types of stores onboarded, repeat order generation from newly ordered stores and other criteria that the brand might consider relevant for successful territory expansion. Once they set these KPIs up and activate the Goal-Driven Sales Technology for these KPIs, BeatRoute’s platform starts guiding their teams and channel partners towards achieving the defined goals.
They say that the proof is in the pudding. We have many testimonials now where our customers have reported measurable impact on their sales output, and vouched for the effectiveness of our approach towards sales enablement.
How does BeatRoute ensure that its platform promotes collaboration at all levels of the distribution hierarchy?
BeatRoute ensures that its platform promotes collaboration at all levels of the sales and distribution hierarchy by providing tools that facilitate communication, information sharing, and goal alignment among sales teams, distributors, retailers, and channel influencers. We facilitate collaboration in many ways –
Firstly everyone involved in the sales and distribution process is on a common digital platform, there are no silos being created where execution might get haywire. For example, if the goal of a business is to introduce a new product in the market, it gets defined within our platform as a set of business KPIs, and the sales team, distributors and retailers, are all empowered with the right workflows to achieve this goal. They get the right product information at their fingertips, sales executives are gamified to push the new product in their orders, distributors are nudged to utilize the relevant trade schemes effectively, the retailers are educated with multimedia and are rewarded if they include the newly launched product in their order basket.
Secondly people use social channels like WhatsApp to communicate with each other in the context of active links of various data sets that one wants to seek the attention of his colleague.
Thirdly we bring close ended collaboration among two user groups where one user group may not even exist on BeatRoute platform by integrating with the other platform that carries the other use group. For example issues raised by a territory sales team may require product research team to address the issue and they might be operating on an internal issue tracking system. BeatRoute uses its integration and automation middleware Matrix to quickly integrate with this issue tracking system.
This collaborative approach helps businesses optimize their sales efforts and drive holistic sales transformation.
How does BeatRoute support businesses that are just starting to implement a sales enablement strategy?
Even among the customers who are early in their sales transformation journey, there are two clear subtypes that we encounter. Businesses that are just starting to implement a sales enablement strategy, and businesses that had implemented some old, inflexible, unscalable systems a long time back but are not restarting from scratch.
Both these scenarios are well served by BeatRoute due to our user-friendly platform with zero-code configurability that enables easy customization and configuration without the need for technical expertise. The platform’s modularity allows businesses to choose and integrate only the modules they need, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, we enable easy integrations with their existing systems so that they don’t have to replace everything all at once, and can gradually incorporate BeatRoute into their tech stack.
What kind of customer support does BeatRoute provide to its clients?
BeatRoute provides comprehensive customer support to its clients through a dedicated customer success team that offers assistance with onboarding, training, customization, and ongoing technical support. We are committed to ensuring a positive customer experience and helping businesses achieve their sales goals.
What kind of security measures does BeatRoute have in place to protect sensitive customer data?
Since we work with enterprise customers, we have very robust security measures in place to protect sensitive customer data, including encryption, access controls, and secure data storage. We use OWASP Top 10 methodology to build in security for our secure software development life cycle. Application penetration testing is performed twice a year basis, each year by an independent third party, which includes manual and automatic testing methods. Customers can find all the details about our security certifications and policies by downloading the publically available security whitepaper from our website.
Can you explain how BeatRoute’s pricing model works?
BeatRoute operates on a subscription-based pricing model, which caters to businesses of various sizes and requirements. Pricing is determined by factors such as the number of users, modules chosen, and additional services required. The flexible pricing model allows businesses to choose the best plan that fits their needs and budget, ensuring that they have access to the right tools and features to achieve their sales goals.
