How Important Is Secondary Sales Tracking For Over The Counter (otc) Products?

By Author: Rakesh Kumar
Total Articles: 33
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For any business enterprise, the key to staying ahead of the competition lies in foresight and planning.


Foresight and planning are the two crucial keys for any business enterprise to keep sailing. Particularly for companies dealing in Over-The-Counter (OTC) products, getting a real-time view is essential for good sales, as the chances of alternate-product sale are high with OTC products. For the simple reason that the customer may have choices available from your competitor’s brands, it is imperative that your product is available in right quantity and at all counters, so that you don’t lose to your competition.


In case of OTC products, the chances of a customer choosing an alternative product are high.


The precision in product forecasting creates momentum in business functioning and provides an opportunity for reality check for OTC manufacturers as to what worked last year, the gaps in production and distribution, and where the future market is headed. That’s the reason companies across the globe aim to capture sales data at primary level. They establish ...
... ERPs that capture primary sales data. Yet why do many OTC product manufacturers bear the niggling brunt of poor decision-making? Because tracking primary sales data alone is a not an adequate step to attain foresight and real-time visibility. On the contrary, it can disturb the production planning with non-availability of actual product demand data and consumer buying patterns. Hence, clear and end-to-end visibility is an important factor for an OTC product manufacturer to uphold its sales and stand the competition.


The benefits of primary level sales data are realized only when Secondary and Tertiary level sales data is measured. The following cases highlight the grey areas where the OTC manufacturers can get a toll on their business in absence of a streamlined and automated sales management system.


Better Demand & Supply Forecast - An eagle’s eye view on the sales distribution cycle helps to take an informed decision on further production planning. Non-availability of secondary and tertiary sales data may mislead you into producing more quantity of the product that has less demand, and less quantity of the product with high demand.

Improvised Supply Chain Management & Better Production Planning- Gaining visibility on how your product is being accepted in the particular demography, you can enjoy improvised supply chain management and better production planning.

Reduce inventory holding time [self life-cycle] - It is an accepted fact that OTC products have a lower shelf life and distributors and dealers must reduce the inventory holding time to maintain timely and synchronized distribution. It is imperative at all levels like top-to-bottom and in case of sales return from bottom-to-top. With this, the inventory handling costs can be cut down by efficient logistics planning.

Cut down the time spent on manual reporting by sales team so that core sales activities are enhanced - Manual reporting hits hard on business functioning in two critical ways- a) Sales team spends important working hours maintaining reports, which could have been spent on business generation. b) Reporting does not offer accuracy. In an effort to reconcile reports, there may even be some tweaking in opening and closing stock data. With sales automation, you could cut down the time spent on manual reporting.

Avoid Channel conflicts & Data misappropriation- A distribution marketing channel means dealing with multi-dealers, multi-distributors and multi-locations and multi-retailers. Sometimes channel conflicts relating to region, quantity and schemes may create confusion which may hit you right in the face. For example, to leverage some scheme benefits, one dealer might stock huge quantity of the product, which inadvertently means shortage of stock for another dealer. To avoid channel conflict at all levels, a mechanism to measure channel schemes should be deployed.

Avoid unexpected Product launch delays due to poor market analysis and forecast- A product not launched/distributed at the right time fails all other efforts of building a competition-proof strategy. Avoid unexpected product launch delays with secondary and tertiary sales data analysis.

Measure Sales Performance of retailers & sales representatives- Leaving the onus of derailed distribution process with the primary sales data may not be the right approach. The sales performance of retailers and sales representatives down the channel need to be measured. With this, you can incentivize retailers and sales representatives based on their individual & collective performance and launch promotional schemes to encourage sales with the help of accurate sales analysis.

With end to end sales automation and tracking, you can keep a close watch not only on primary sales but also on your secondary and tertiary sales figures with accurate insights of sales area-wise, region wise, distributor-wise, product-variant-wise, SKU-wise, and many more. Automate your sales channel and ensure that your product is never out-of-stock in the market and always in the minds of customers. The sooner, the Better. Streamline sales and distribution, streamline Business!

Rakesh Kumar is a business consultant of Zed Sales™, a leading Sales Tracking Software in India. Zed Sales™ has lots of innovative features which fulfill your needs of online sales tracking software, order management software, target management software and many more.