SOLARMATE
A Universal App used to Automate the Last Mile Distribution of Renewable Household Goods
MEET PRITHA - OUR POLLINATE SALES AGENT
To understand how Pollinate is using our app we need to introduce one of their sales agents. Pritha is a sales agent known as a Suryamukhi who works with Pollinate Group in Lucknow. Pritha was trained by Pollinate to sell their household product range on an installment basis to a slum community near her home. This week Pritha sold a few solar lights and collected some loan repayments. She had to remember the details of each transaction all week before reporting her sale information to a Pollinate field representative.
FIELD REPRESENTATIVE BOTTLENECK
After meeting Pritha the Pollinate field rep then visited 4 other Suryamukhis and manually entered this data into the CRM tool Salesforce back at head office. Being a field rep requires a level of technical expertise that is not easily scalable. Field reps can only manage 5 suryamukhis as they need to physically visit slum communities to collect sales data.
This is the bottleneck faced by Last Mile Distributors all over the world.
Physically collecting sales data and manually entering it into Salesforce has hindered Pollinate's ability to scale and train more Suryamukhis. This effort is exacerbated by data inaccuracies that stem from manual processes and the semi literate nature of Suryamukhi’s like Pritha. Even though this is a tedious and error prone process the data collected is essential as it ensures consistent servicing of product warranties and upholds the high degree of trust and financial stability required by Pollinate to feasibly operate.
SOLARMATE - ENABLING SCALE
That’s where we come in. Pritha now uses SolarMate - our universal point-of-sales mobile application that automates sales tracking directly into Salesforce. SolarMate is specifically designed for semi-literate users with limited technology skills. Instead of remembering a week’s worth of sale information, every transaction or stock request Pritha makes can be directly recorded from the point-of-sale into Salesforce.
AUTOMATING THE DATA CAPTURE PROCESS REMOVES THE BOTTLENECK.
The app’s intuitive UI lowers the technical barrier to entry of Salesforce. This means data collection can be completed by Suryamukhis rather than a field rep. This enables Pollinate to scale the number of Suryamukhi’s they manage AND the number of customers each Suryamukhi can support.
This same bottleneck is seen by Last Mile Distributors everywhere as they attempt to scale. We plan on transforming our app into a universal white label product and scaling it to the other 200 members of the Global Distributors Collective.
