Sales people often get confused in what really beat and route means. They interchangeably use beat and route terms. An effective beat and route plan are the important aspects of FMCG sales  since it prevents wastage of time and effort. Clearly, defined territories ensure there is no overlap between field executives and they are aligned to focus on their outlets. Therefore, one must be very clear about both the terms.

Beat and beat plan

Beat is a collection of outlets a salesman covers in a particular day. Beat plan is a day level route plan made for field sales reps to make visits to a number of stores at a predefined frequency. It defines whom to visit, when to visit based on the company's priorities on stores category. The daily Beat plan is a schedule of outlets that are fixed to be covered on a single day in a route and generate business that is the ultimate objective of the organization. For Example: This is the beat plan of Unites States of Georgia state for ABC company. There are altogether 16 beats. Let's see below;

                                         Fig: Beat plan

Importances of beat plan in FMCG sales

An effective beat plan is one of the most important components of sales and distribution management.

First of all, let’s learn few “importances" of beat plan:

•   Foretells the wastage of time and effort

•   Allows employees to concentrate on their outlets and generate more business

• Allows the field executives to carry out tasks in a way that fulfills the business objectives properly and  

• Aligns the resource capabilities with the company’s goals.

Route

A route is a collection of beats. It  is a set of beats put together. A route may have one or more beats depending on the number of outlets in the route. It is the process of finding the most efficient way to get from point A to B.Here, in the diagram, the number of beats are differentiated as route 1 and route 2 on the basis of the distance between places. So, it would be easier to allocate to sales. Suppose Mr. Joe will be responsible for beats in route one and Mr. Ros will be responsible for beats in route 2.

Fig:Route Plan

Importances of Route Plan in FMCG Sales

Route planning offers significant value to end users or sales reps. There are quite a lot of importances of route plans. Here we detail some of them:

• Helps to identify the most effective cost routes eliminating the unnecessary expenses

• Helps to reduce time spend on planning routes

• Helps to increase productivity of sales reps

• Helps to increase interaction with retailers and reduce the time taken for order collection

• Helps to improve return on investment on the sales team

Summing up both the importances of beat and route plan we can say that beat and route plan helps sales reps in scheduling the party visits at the least possible time with the least possible cost.