Beat planning that reps actually follow

The plan nobody follows

Every distributor has a beat plan on paper. Monday: Gulshan. Tuesday: Defence. Wednesday: Saddar. Neat territories, clean coverage on a map. And almost every distributor also has reps who quietly skip half of it, double-visit the friendly shopkeepers who offer tea, and never set foot in the low-volume outlets that the plan says they should cover weekly.

The gap between the plan on paper and the route walked in reality is where distribution leaks money. Outlets go un-serviced for weeks. Competitors fill the shelf. The owner has no idea until secondary sales quietly slide.

Why reps abandon the plan

It is rarely laziness. The usual causes are structural:

1. The plan was built in a spreadsheet by someone who has never walked the beat. It groups outlets by postal area, not by how a motorbike actually moves through traffic.
2. It ignores outlet rhythm. A wholesaler who only orders on the 1st and 15th does not need a weekly visit. A fast-moving kiryana store needs two.
3. There is no feedback loop. The rep skips an outlet and nothing happens. No flag, no question. So skipping becomes the norm.
4. The plan is invisible in the field. It lives on a printed sheet that gets lost by Wednesday.

What a followable plan looks like

A beat plan reps actually follow has four properties:

• It is on their phone, one outlet at a time. Not a list of 40 names — the next stop, with a map pin and the last order summary.
• Visit frequency matches outlet value. High-value, high-frequency outlets get more slots; tail outlets get a sensible cadence, not a guilt-driven weekly visit.
• It records reality, not just intention. Every visit (and every skip) is logged with a GPS stamp and a reason. "Shop closed," "owner travelling," "no stock space" — these are data, not excuses.
• Skips surface immediately. A manager sees, the same evening, which planned outlets were missed and why. Patterns emerge fast: this rep always skips the far end of the territory; that territory is genuinely over-planned.

The strike-rate metric

The single number that tells you whether a beat plan is working is the strike rate: of the outlets a rep was supposed to visit, how many did they actually visit and take a productive action at (an order, a payment, a merchandising task)? Not just "checked in" — a productive action.

A healthy strike rate sits north of 80%. When it drops, you do not have a rep problem or a software problem — you have a plan problem. Either the route is wrong, the frequency is wrong, or the outlet should not be on the active list at all.

How we approached it at DistroOps

We made the beat plan a living object, not a printout. Outlets carry a value tier and a cadence. The day view shows reps one stop at a time with the last visit and last order in front of them. Skips need a reason code. Managers get an evening digest: planned vs visited, strike rate by rep and territory, and a flag on any outlet un-serviced beyond its cadence.

The result is not a plan reps are forced to follow. It is a plan that is light enough to follow, visible enough to be accountable, and honest enough to fix when it is wrong.

Where to start

If your strike rate is a mystery today, that is the place to begin. Before optimising routes or buying anything, just measure: of what was planned, what actually happened? Once that number is visible, every conversation about coverage gets concrete — and the plan stops being fiction.