Beat Routes and Van Sales for a Growing Indian Brand

A founder asking about offline distribution usually asks how many distributors are needed. That is the wrong first question. The right one is how many shops get visited, how often, by whom, and what happens on each visit. That is a beat plan, and it is the actual unit of work in general trade.

What a beat plan is

A beat is a fixed list of outlets in a defined area that one salesman visits on one specific day of the week, in a set sequence. Six beats make a week. A salesman works the same beat on the same day, so a shop knows that your man comes on Tuesday, and a shopkeeper can plan his order around it. Predictability is the entire point. A route that changes every week is not a beat, it is a wander.

The beat plan is a document. It lists outlet name, outlet code, address, class, day of visit, sequence number and the salesman assigned. It is owned by the area sales manager and reviewed at least twice a year, because markets move and shops shut. If nobody at your company can produce this document as a file, you do not have distribution. You have a few shops that happen to reorder.

Classifying outlets and setting frequency

Outlets are not equal and should not be visited equally. Classification is normally done on business potential for your category, not on shop size and not on what the shop currently buys from you. A large store buying nothing from you today is high potential, not low value.

The usual grades run from the highest potential outlets down to the smallest, often labelled A through D, sometimes with a separate class for wholesale and another for self service stores. Frequency follows the grade. The top class earns a weekly visit. The middle earns fortnightly. The tail may be monthly, or handled by a wholesaler rather than a direct call. Get the grading wrong and everything downstream is wrong, because you will be spending your most expensive resource, salesman time, on shops that cannot pay it back.

Two rules keep this honest. Grade on category potential, and re-grade on a fixed calendar rather than whenever someone complains. Ask to see when your outlet universe was last re-graded. If the answer is at launch, the plan is stale.

Productive calls, lines per call, and the rest of the scorecard

These are the numbers a founder can ask for without knowing the trade. Every one of them is standard and every competent sales manager already tracks them.

• Total calls per day. How many outlets the salesman actually visited. Compare against the beat list to get beat adherence.
• Productive calls. How many of those visits produced an order. Productive divided by total is the strike rate, and it is the single most honest measure of whether the beat is real.
• Lines per call. How many distinct SKUs went into each productive order. This tells you whether you are selling a range or one hero product with a shadow.
• Drop size. Average order value per productive call. Watch it alongside lines per call, because drop size can be inflated by loading one SKU.
• Unique billed outlets in a month. Not calls, outlets. Growth here is real expansion. Growth in volume without growth here is loading.
• Must sell list compliance. The share of outlets stocking the SKUs you have decided that class must carry.

Ask for these split by salesman and by beat, not as a territory average. Averages hide the two beats doing all the work and the two doing none.

Van sales and pre-selling are two different businesses

In van sales, the stock travels with the salesman. He arrives, sells, delivers and collects in one visit. It suits markets with low outlet density, long distances, cash trade and small orders, which usually means rural and smaller towns. It is fast, it converts on the spot, and it needs no second trip. The costs are real. The vehicle is loaded on judgement rather than orders, so the assortment on board is always slightly wrong. Stock accountability is weaker because product and cash sit with one person. Range is limited to what fits.

In pre-selling, the salesman books the order today and delivery follows separately, often the next day. It suits denser urban markets. Because he carries no stock, he can sell the full range, spend time on merchandising, and push new SKUs that a van would never carry. It needs a working delivery mechanism, more discipline on order accuracy, and a distributor who can service the next day reliably. Fill rate becomes a number you have to watch, because an order booked and not delivered is worse than no order at all.

Most growing brands end up running both, split by geography rather than by preference. Van in the rural and small town beats, pre-selling in the metro and larger urban beats. Choosing one model nationally is usually a sign that nobody has looked at the outlet density map.

Saturated, or just badly serviced

Before you accept that a territory is finished, run these four checks in order.

• Coverage. How many outlets in the territory exist for your category, and how many did you bill even once in the last three months. Compare against a physical count of one market, done on foot, not against your own master. Most brands discover their universe is larger than their list.
• Strike rate by beat. A territory with high coverage and a poor strike rate is not saturated. It is being visited badly.
• Lines per call. If the average outlet stocks two of your eight relevant SKUs, the growth is inside existing shops and does not need a single new outlet.
• Attrition. Count outlets billed six months ago that are not being billed now. A market that keeps adding new outlets while quietly losing old ones looks flat and is actually leaking.

Genuine saturation looks like high coverage, healthy strike rate, high lines per call and low attrition, with growth flattening anyway. That is rare. Everything else is a service problem, and service problems are cheaper to fix than new territories are to open.