Tata Power implements practices on productivity monitoring for salesforce with learnings from Voltas

Published on December 21, 2022

Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power company, Tata Power has recently forayed into the B2C sector with its Solar Rooftops vertical. For this reason, the company wanted to understand sales channel management and learn how established players in the Tata Group use systems, processes and KPIs to measure the effectiveness and productivity of the salesforce. On January 25, 2022, in a session facilitated by Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG), Deba Ghoshal (VP & Head Marketing), Jogesh Jaitly (VP - Sales UPBG & Voltas Beko) and Chetak Malhotra (AGM - Market Activation) from Voltas shared their practices pertaining to salesforce productivity monitoring with Tata Power.

In the session, the Voltas team emphasised the importance of reach and distribution, and continuous re-visiting of its proposition as critical factors of success in a consumer business. They shared their product sales structure, sales administration structure and approach with channel partners – general trade (distribution & dealers), modern trade, ecommerce, and key accounts (institutional). During the pandemic, Voltas had launched its own webstore (https://voltaslounge.com/) to reach out to customers. The team also spoke about KPIs, IT reviews, use of search engine optimisation, ensuring quality last-mile connectivity with the customer, and the important role played by store personnel, whom Voltas refers to as ambassadors (VISA).

Following the session, Tata Power has been able to implement the following learnings:

1. Digitised beat plan for tracking daily activities of the salesforce: Daily meetings of the sales team are tracked digitally via the CRM platform which helps 200+ sales personnel to improve their work efficiency. It tracks meeting-related KPIs and issues reminders of follow-up tasks.
2. Digitised revenue dashboard for the sales team: This dashboard is exclusively for the sales team to track individual achievements against the target for the financial year. 150+ sales teams in the field are informed about their target vs achievement score on a daily basis via this dashboard. It has helped maintain razor sharp focus on this critical KPI.
3. Comprehensive scorecard for channel partner covering aspects beyond revenue: Scorecard of channel partners have been revamped to include the following aspects:
   1. Revenue target vs achievement
   2. Timeliness of installation
   3. Quality of installation
425+ channel partners will get evaluated on the above parameters which will drive focus on key metrics. Incentive schemes are also planned on the above to reinforce focus.
4. Monthly communication to each channel partner on ledger opening, debit, credit and closing: In the first week of every month, an account statement is sent to all 425+ channel partners which includes ledger opening, debit, credit and closing balance. This helps in achieving better transparency and reliability of business transactions.
5. Incentive communication with full calculation for each channel partner: There are two structures of incentive disbursement which include target and achievement, milestone based incentive and monthly order booking achievement. Detailed messaging with all the calculations are shared with each channel partner to avoid ambiguity and build trust. 
6. Town and customer segment-wise new channel planning: Internal channel planning has been revised and built based on region, state, town, and segment (residential, commercial industry, and both). Based on this, the BD team scouts for channel partners in their respective regions and enhances their channel network. For this FY, Tata Power has successfully on-boarded 110+ new channel partners.
7. Channel on-boarding criteria refinement: While there are aggressive targets for adding new channel partners, standardised criteria is used for evaluating and on-boarding new partners. Channel partner count increased 25% from 342 last year (2021) to 425+ for H1 2022.

Tata Power has been able put its best practice learning into execution.

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