Improving the activation rate in the point of sale (POS) channel of the retail distribution

• Main Author: Gonzales, Avril Donovan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2020
• Subjects: Retail trade; Point-of-sale systems; Stores, Retail; Sales and Merchandising
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/6158; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_masteral/article/13246/viewcontent/Gonzales__Avril_Donovan__11789018__Improving_the_Activation_Rate_in_the_Point_of_Sale__POS__Channel_of_the_Retail_Distribution_Redacted.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

This integrative action research focused on increasing the rate of activating new stores of Schneider Electric Philippines (SEPHIL), an energy management company engaged in industrial automation and manufacturing/distribution of electrical control products and equipment. I work as a Retail Account Manager for Luzon. The Point-of-Sale (POS) channel, a retail sales and marketing team that is still being developed in our company, faced challenges in activating new stores. Store activation means having the partner stores buy and stock our products for selling to customers. The issue concerning our company is the low monthly activation rate of 2 stores, whereas our target monthly store activation rate is 25 stores in order for us to reach our target market penetration rate of 10% by the end of 2020. To address this issue, our action research team used the Customer Relationship Value Chain model (Batil, 2019) as a guiding framework. In the first cycle of this action research, our team integrated (blended or combined) the company’s Customer Care Center Leads Generation team in the Point of Sale (POS) activation phase of our existing POS Management Process, to engage customers and to generate leads for the POS sales team. We also created a performance management framework of the third-party sales representatives or, internally we call them, the feet-on-the-street (FOS). The results of the integration of the Customer Care Center Leads Generation Team in the activation phase of the POS Management Process and the establishment of a performance management framework drove a 400% growth in the activation rate of the POS. Despite that our team did not fully achieve the ideal target activation rate of 25 stores per month, this action research greatly enhanced the retail distribution channel in our company.