Hello Rémi Ginoux, could you introduce yourself and tell us what is your job at Barilla?
Hello, my name is Rémi Ginoux and I am a sales support manager at Barilla.
Sales support is a team of six people in the field, so it's a small team within the larger team. Our mission is to coordinate the strategy and communicate the right priorities to the field teams, and also to monitor the KPIs, especially our ROI. That's why I co-lead the deployment of our 2022 sectorization.
Barilla is a multi-category company, leader in its markets, present with Harrys in bread, Barilla in pasta and sauces and Wasa and Molino Bianco.
What is your sales force organisation?
We have 94 sales people who are divided into twelve regions. Then there are two area managers
who report to a sales director in addition to sales support, making a team of 116 people.
What problems did you want to address by calling on Datakiss?
The objective was to update our commercial pressure because the previous sectorization was from 2018. So necessarily, there were adjustments to be made because stores are opening, closing, expanding. Stores gain or lose market share.
Some channels have developed, especially post Covid. I'm thinking of the drive and the proxi. In short, we had to adapt our strike force to the playing field of 2022.
Then, internally, the objective was to balance the workloads among the 94 salespeople, to review the organization of the regions so that there would be homogeneity, a potential turnover in four categories and not people.
We carried out a study in our company on the pockets of growth that we could exploit for our future sectorization. Then, with Datakiss and Nielsen, we decided on a retroplanning. And then Nielsen delivered a ranking
of our stores. Datakiss provided us with a zero scenario which was our working base on which we first worked with Datakiss to determine the contours of the future regions, sectors and zones of 2022.
Afterwards, we held a workshop with all the regional managers in order to adapt each outline to the reality of the field and take into account everyone's recommendations. Because knowledge of the field remains at the manager field level in view of the future deployment.
How did the project with Datakiss go?
The project went extremely well. We are delighted with our collaboration and all the teams that were able to work with Datakiss internally are delighted because it's not just the sales manager who worked with Datakiss, the regional managers and the sector managers also worked with Datakiss. Because of the collaborative dimension of the teams, because the human dimension is key in the project, the teams are at the service of a very powerful Datakiss tool in terms of sectorization.
It is a tool that allows us to make a diagnosis that takes into account routing, which reflects the working time of the teams with targeted frequencies and points of sale. Once the diagnosis was made, it also enabled us to arrive at an initial recommendation that we refined in a second phase with the regional directors. The regional directors were involved in the project to bring their expertise to the table. And they interacted. We had live interactions with Datakiss and, in a third phase, the sector managers were also able to do the necessary fine tuning based on their knowledge of the points of sale.
What are the benefits of using Territory Planning?
The end result is that we have better coverage of our points of sale. We have gained five DV points in terms of coverage. We also visit more stores, channels that we didn't necessarily visit or not
well enough.
We have better balanced the load between our vendors, our people between regions. Territory Planning has also allowed us to have an extremely clear picture of the workload. Of course, as I said, but also what makes up this workload at the sector level? Is it the face to face? Is it the time that I spend in the customer's office or my routing, which is the time that I finally use to move between my home, my
store one, two, three, four and back home.
Would you recommend Datakiss to another National Sales Directorate?
I would say that Datakiss is an essential tool for establishing a commercial workload, because the algorithm on which we rely is extremely reactive in the sense that we have the capacity to have all the KPIs in real time on the modifications we make, on the workload of course, but also on the routing and on the face-to-face, the face-to-face being the time we spend with our customers.
The routing is the time that is spent between the movement of the home of the CS with the store one, two, three, four and until the return to the home of the CS.
Datakiss also had the ability to propose solutions to the problems posed and other problems that we discovered in the course of the project and to propose
solutions that we implemented and that we could not have thought of.
And then, in summary, I would also say that Datakiss, through its expertise, has the ability to dialogue with all stakeholders to propose solutions. I've talked about this and of course we are accompanied from the ground up to commercial development.