BY BUSINESS REPORTER SCHWEPPES Zimbabwe Limited (SZL) has partnered with South African headquartered mobile technology specialist company, MACmobile, for optimised sales and customer relations. In a recent joint statement, it was revealed that the partnership had provided SZL with the capacity to develop and improve its relations with customers. “Thanks to our partnership with MACmobile, we can rest assured that our sales and marketing strategies are on point and we can readily meet the ever-changing requirements of the markets we serve,” said SZL corporate affairs executive Diana Mubayiwa. “Ultimately, our partnership with SZL has provided MACmobile a deeper penetration within the independent distributors that trade under the Coca-Cola Company license. It has also strengthened our footprint and user-base within the Sadc region.” She added: “Before partnering with MACmobile, our sales teams would manually track or reference customer history and cold drink equipment (CDE) which was highly ineffective. As a result, this led to suboptimal fulfilment of customer orders and CDE asset utilisation”. SZL has two manufacturing plants in Harare and Bulawayo and 10 distribution centres countrywide. Its route to the market is predominantly business-to-business and was recently extended to include business-to-consumer through e-commerce and tele-sales platforms. Most of SZL’s orders are delivered through in-house logistics and third-party partners with a smaller portion handled through customer collection at the distribution centres. As such, the MACmobile’s field force solution has in the last four years provided SZL with the ability to develop customer relations through the capture of key market data, generation of customer orders and tracking of sales activities and marketing assets. The solution allows a company to run its fast-moving consumer-goods distribution in one central platform and gain sight of sales, stock and finances. “Our fieldforce offering delivers an end-to-end solution to SZL that covers their full spectrum of route-to-market sales and distribution, ultimately catering for the specific needs and nuances of FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] call cycles within Zimbabwe’s retail, rural and main markets,” said MACmobile managing director Andrew Dawson. SZL and MACmobile’s partnership, according to the two firms, has led to an improved sales force and customer relations for the former, driven by accurate data that can be used to improve go-to-market and retention strategies. This is because the partnership has led SZL to be a step ahead of the requirements of both its sales team and clients.