Telling the African story with data

The African economies are mostly described by top-down macroeconomic data from international organizations like World Bank, IMF and national state departments like the ministries. This information usually involves approximations and generalizations which barely gives the granular consumer level data that can be useful for policy making or for consumer companies which require bottom up data to effectively plan, find and evaluate markets for their Fast Moving Consumer Goods. It is this kind of market invisibility for the African markets that complicate doing business here yet more than 80% of sales happen at the informal retail outlets.

Many consumer companies have tried to solve this issue of market invisibility through various ways like using established distributors in the region to stock up remote outlets, personal/van selling to promote their products in remote areas, agency marketing among others but all these methods don’t provide consistent real time data that can be used to generate insights on consumer behaviour to enable FMCG companies to optimize on their distribution and avoid stock out situations even in the remote areas. Further, the stiff competition by cheap imports and counterfeits worsen this situations for the companies for lack of this real time data.

Its this situation that has precipitated the need for software solutions that can capture consumer behaviour or sales data at the granular level and form the basis of informing the consumer companies on their market visibility. These companies include https://saapcrm.com/ which offers a solution that manages and optimizes all your sales team’s field activities via a simple mobile app as they collect and transmit real time data in the format the companies want. It further, maps and visualizes the market outlets that sell your products on dashboards with the data from those outlets. You can as well query data by a parameter to display the relevant data on the dashboards. The SaapCRM analytic engine also generates quality reports from the data collected to give management actionable insights on the go.

Its through such efforts that we can document and open up Africa markets by capturing data that can enable investors, entrepreneurs, governments, NGOs to effectively plan, make policy, distribute resources optimally so that we can be served effectively. As they say “you can’t plan on what you can’t measure.”