

Tata Consumer Products is home to some of India’s largest and most iconic consumer brands – including Tata Tea, Tetley, Tata Salt, Eight O’Clock Coffee, and Himalayan Water, as well as emerging brands like Tata Sampann and Tata Soulfull. Currently ranked among India’s top ten fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, Tata Consumer reaches 263 million households across the country.
Ramping up sales and distribution required a digital-first approach
Looking to capture a larger share of the FMCG market, Tata Consumer set out to digitally transform sales and distribution across their vast channel partner network.
“Even though online shopping is on the rise, most of our business still comes from local kirana stores,” says T.V. Swaminathan, Global Chief Digital Officer, Tata Consumer. “Increasing sales and distribution through these outlets is our top priority – and technology holds the key.”
The company already had a sales automation and distributor management system (DMS). But user adoption was poor due to the tool’s limited sales intelligence, scalability, and field sales visibility.
That prompted the search for a new platform to transform both back-end and front-end operations. The platform had to provide complete oversight of the sales and distribution ecosystem. At the same time, it needed to be so intuitive that even a sales rep who’d only studied till Class 5 would be able to use it with ease.
“We wanted a truly state-of-the-art sales platform – and Salesforce was the obvious choice,” says Swaminathan. “It takes care of all the technical fundamentals, so that we can easily build on top of it. Plus, it’s solid, proven, scalable, and secure.”
Our sales and distribution engine on Salesforce is not just highly intuitive – it also has the scalability to manage our massive channel partner ecosystem. The fact that we built and deployed this platform in just seven months is unprecedented in the industry.
Sunil D’SouzaManaging Director & CEO, Tata Consumer Products
Automation of end-to-end DMS processes boosts efficiency and speed
With Salesforce, Tata Consumer has built a next-generation sales and distribution engine called ‘MAVIC’ – a portmanteau of Maverick and Magic.
MAVIC is the company’s comprehensive DMS, streamlining and automating end-to-end distributor management processes. Take distributor onboarding, for example. Everything from data validation, to account creation and activation is automated. This has made the process more efficient and faster.
“It used to take us a week to onboard distributors, but with MAVIC, the entire process is completed in under 45 minutes,” says Swaminathan. “Retail outlets are onboarded in even less time - two minutes.”
Post onboarding, MAVIC is used by sales teams to manage primary orders and secondary sales, as well as billing, invoicing, returns, and claims. All inventory is tracked and updated on the platform. Even distributor incentives and performance are managed there.
Since the tool is easy to use, sales reps can get started on it right away with minimal training.
MAVIC is also connected to key enterprise systems like the ERP platform and data warehouse through MuleSoft. These integrations make it easy to synchronise orders, inventory, pricing, and sales data across systems in real time.
An easy-to-use sales mobile app powers 6M+ transactions a month
With the MAVIC mobile app, direct sales representatives (DSRs) – i.e., reps who go out and visit the retailers associated with a distributor – are a lot more efficient. They can use the app’s beat creation and planning capabilities to determine which stores to visit each day, and which route will get them there the fastest.
At the store, they can capture retail orders in real time, while also synching their app with distributor inventory to check product availability. Promotions and discounts are automatically applied to each order through a scheme computation engine built on Heroku.
Overall, six million transactions are enabled through the app every month.
The app also highlights priority SKUs (stock keeping units) or new product launches, so that they can be promoted effectively at retail outlets. Users can even track the adoption of these products and their contribution to sales.
After each store visit, automated alerts help sales reps follow up with retailers wherever needed. Reps can also personalise their individual KPIs, and track their progress against sales targets in real time.
Meanwhile, territory sales executives (TSEs) – i.e., internal sales leaders who manage all the distributors and retailers within a particular area – can use the MAVIC app to monitor sales performance. Powerful dashboards offer them data-driven insights on territory health, distributor performance, product demand, order frequency, retailer engagement, and other key metrics that are essential to growing sales.
“MAVIC is helping us transform our business in many ways,” says Sunil D’Souza, Managing Director & CEO, Tata Consumer. “It has given us the opportunity to aggressively pursue our key strategic priorities in the quest from good to great.”
A quick rollout enabled 3,000+ distributors to be onboarded in just four months
Tata Consumer’s digital transformation is unfolding on Salesforce with remarkable speed and efficiency. The entire development and roll-out of the MAVIC platform was completed in a record seven months, compared to the industry average of almost two years.
Over 3,000 distributors migrated to the platform in just four months. And at the peak of the rollout, approximately 200 distributors were onboarded in a single day, showcasing the platform's scalability and agility.
Today, MAVIC is used by 8,000+ sales employees to serve 12,000+ distributors and over 1.6 million retail outlets.
The company’s speed to market has also increased.
“With MAVIC, we can build, experiment, learn, and scale with ease,” says Swaminathan. “In just two months, we rolled out 20+ new features on the platform. Earlier, that would have taken us six months.”
Service automation speeds up case resolution
Tata Consumer also uses Salesforce Service Cloud to capture and resolve service requests from end customers. If, for example, a product has expired, or the packaging is torn, customers can raise a complaint via email, phone, social media, or the web. All complaints are consolidated on one platform, and assigned to the right service agent based on skill and availability.
The agent can then immediately pull up the customer’s case history, communication threads, and other key details for context. They can also access knowledge articles, milestone trackers, and automated tools like macros to speed up case resolution.
A systematic root cause analysis helps identify and plug revenue leaks. For example, if a customer complaint about a damaged product is traced back to improper inventory storage, teams can take proactive actions to remedy the issue, and minimise customer complaints.
All of this boosts customer satisfaction and trust.
Tata Consumer is now collaborating with the Salesforce Signature Success team to derive more value from the Salesforce platform. The team’s recommendations have helped the company optimise their order-to-invoice-conversion architecture, and process three million invoices in one month.
The team is also measuring Tata Consumer’s success on Salesforce, monitoring their health around the clock, and delivering proactive alerts wherever corrective action is needed.
Next: Deep diving into AI will unlock new market opportunities
Going forward, Tata Consumer has planned multiple AI interventions on Salesforce.
“Our partnership with Salesforce has been instrumental in furthering our digital transformation, and aligning our operations with rapidly changing market dynamics,” says D’souza. “We’re excited to see how AI can be used to expand our retail reach and market share."
Managing 12,000+ distributors and over 1.6 million retail stores can be a massive logistical challenge even for the best of companies. But Tata Consumer makes it look easy. By using Salesforce to automate their entire sales and distributor management lifecycle – while simultaneously empowering sales reps with real-time insights in the flow of work – the company is increasing sales, and building stronger channel partner relationships.