Retail execution and outlet audits for beer sales teams

The sale is won or lost at the cooler

A beer company can do everything right at the brewery and still lose the sale in the last two metres. The consumer walks into a shop on a hot afternoon, opens the cooler and takes whatever cold beer is at eye level. If your brand is warm on a back shelf, it may as well be absent.

Retail execution is the set of standards a sales team agrees for every outlet: what should be stocked, where, at what temperature, at what price and how fresh. An outlet audit is the check that those standards are being met. Done well, it tells the sales team where to spend its next visit. Done badly, it becomes a photo collection nobody reads.

Availability comes first, then where it sits

The first check is simple: are the agreed SKUs physically on the shelf or in the cooler? Out of stock in beer has two common causes. Either the outlet did not order enough before a hot weekend, or the distributor ran short. The audit should record which, because the fixes are different.

The second check is placement. Beer bought for drinking soon is bought cold. Space in a visi-cooler, the glass door chiller found in many Indian outlets, matters more than space on a warm shelf. Record facings in the cooler separately from facings on the shelf. For how audit data feeds market share reporting, see our guide to reading beer market share and retail audit data.

Temperature and light are beer quality checks

This is where beer differs from most packaged goods. Heat ages beer. A lager kept at 35 °C for a few weeks will taste noticeably staler than the same lager kept cold, with papery and sweet notes replacing the fresh malt and hop character. Light is worse for beer in clear or green glass: a few hours in strong sun can produce a skunky smell.

So an audit should check a few product conditions:

• Is the cooler actually cold? Lagers are usually served around 3 to 7 °C. A cooler switched off at night or overloaded with warm stock fails that.
• Is any beer stored in direct sunlight, in a window or outside the door?
• Are cases stacked near a heat source, such as a generator or a tin roof?

The floor detail we would teach every auditor: put a hand on the side of a bottle in the cooler. If it is not properly cold, note the cooler temperature setting and whether the door seal is closing.

Freshness is a date code, not a feeling

Every bottle and can carries a packaging or best before date. The audit should record the oldest date found for each SKU. Old stock at the front and fresh stock at the back means the outlet is not rotating, so the consumer gets the old beer first.

A worked example: if a brand's best before is six months from packaging and the oldest bottle in an outlet is five months old, that outlet is selling beer near the end of its life. If the same SKU elsewhere is three weeks old, the problem is local ordering and rotation, not the brewery.

Freshness data, collected over many outlets, also tells supply chain where stock is sitting too long in the pipeline. Our guide to the draught beer business covers the keg side, where freshness and line cleaning matter even more.

Price and visibility need the state rules in mind

Beer in India is sold at an MRP printed on the label, registered with each state. The audit should check that the outlet is not charging above MRP and that price communication follows the rules. Direct alcohol advertising is not permitted in India. Point of sale material is regulated differently by each state. What a sales team may place in or around an outlet varies, so the audit standard should come from the compliance team, not from a template.

Visibility checks should record what is allowed: agreed branded coolers, shelf strips or menus where permitted. Trade promotions that pay for visibility should be checked against what the outlet actually delivered. Our guide to trade spend and promotions covers how that money is tracked.

Turn audits into a short list of actions

The common failure is collecting too much and acting on too little. Score each outlet on four or five measures that matter: availability of core SKUs, cooler share, cooler temperature, oldest date code and price compliance. Rank outlets by the gap between their score and their sales potential.

Then make the next visit about the top gap in each outlet. A cooler that is warm needs a service call. A shelf full of old stock needs a rotation fix and a smaller next order. A missing SKU needs an order before the weekend.

Your first step: take ten recent audits from one territory and pull out just two numbers for each outlet, cooler temperature and oldest date code. You will see which outlets are selling your beer at its best and which are selling it tired.