The three of them – Peeyush Jain, Divir Tiwari and Apurv Gupta – tinkered with some ventures, including an email system for their institution, when they were studying at Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (now IIT Dhanbad). In 2010, straight out of college, they started Flick2Know Technologies, which generated QR codes for companies.
One of the big campaigns they ran, Peeyush recalls with a lot of pride, was for Hero MotoCorp in 2011. From the beginning, Flick2Know has been under incubation at IIM-Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, as part of its i-Accelerator programme.
After three years of helping companies generate QR (Quick Response) codes, the founders decided to make the platform an open source one and pivoted their business into developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for sales force automation.
Thus was born FieldAssist that provides on sales force automation services on a mobile platform. The platform helps monitor sales personnel on the ground, giving consumer goods companies greater say and visibility over sales. The platform, according to Peeyush, generates live data and provides analytics to both the company and the sales person on the field. It provides inputs such as when the salesperson visited a particular shop and what he sold there, based on which he can position his sales campaign. FieldAssist also brought on board Paramdeep Singh, an entrepreneur himself, as its Chief Executive Officer. When FieldAssist launched the sales force automation (SFA) platform, it had two hosiery units as customers. Paramdeep says he was keen to expand into the FMCG sector as that was a huge vertical and FMCG companies had a big challenge in monitoring their sales personnel and analysing their work.
Empowering salespersons
Paramdeep says companies were merely looking for a tracking solution, but FieldAssist came up with one that was more than that. The idea was to empower the salesperson on the field and also provide the company with intelligent, data-driven analytics to help them improve sales. “We are now associated with more than 120 brands in the country,” says Paramdeep.
Peeyush and Paramdeep say that they decided to target the FMCG sector as it was behind others in adopting technology. The challenge was to make salespersons digitally literate and get them to use FieldAssist’s platform on their mobile phones. Now, companies are reaching out to them for their product based on referrals, says Paramdeep.
From dealing with salespersons’ problems, FieldAssist is now more focussed on analysing the voluminous data generated during field visits. It helps them with the strategy to be adopted in a particular market or even territory. From a pan-India strategy, the company is now able to help its customers with street level strategy, he says.
FieldAssist gets its income from the companies that use its SaaS platform, on a per user, per month basis.
FieldAssist has raised ₹1.5 crore in debt from SIDBI and is not looking at any external funding for the moment.
(The article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine.)