For global food and beverage brand PepsiCo, Mexico plays a critically important role. In fact, it’s the company’s second-largest market after the U.S. But while the U.S. market is tilted toward big grocery chains and convenience stores, Mexico’s retail landscape is filled with small customers. “It’s one of the markets in the world where you have a huge amount of small mom-and-pop stores,” says Johannes Evenblij, senior vice president of commercial and consumer transformation at PepsiCo. “There are millions of them.”
That made the job of a PepsiCo salesperson especially busy. Each week, they’d visit the stores on their route, meeting with owners, taking orders, and suggesting new products. They’d also let owners know which snacks or drinks seemed to be flying off the shelves at a store across town, although that advice was anecdotal at best—getting precise sales information to its sales team on the ground was a constant challenge.
In recent years, PepsiCo has taken big steps to change the equation for both its customers and salespeople. The 2022 debut of the MiNegocio+ app provided customers with an easy way to place orders from their smartphone and learn more about products they might want to stock. It also gave them more visibility into the broad universe of PepsiCo products available to them, including new items to add to their shelves. The MiNegocio+ app also dramatically shifted the role of PepsiCo’s sales team, letting them focus less on filling out order forms and more on partnering with customers to help them grow.
“Mexico is our biggest international market, and the biggest front line in our sales organization,” says Athina Kanioura, CEO, Latin America Foods, and global chief strategy and transformation officer of PepsiCo. “Changing the role of the sales organization from an order taker to a business development relationship manager is critical for the success of the company. It’s all about human advancement and human empowerment.”
POWERING GROWTH WITH EB2B
The MiNegocio+ app was piloted in Colombia and is being rolled out across PepsiCo’s global footprint. The app, known as PepsiConnect outside of Latin America, is a key eB2B sales component within a companywide digital transformation strategy that aims to streamline areas ranging from manufacturing to product development.
“We understood that we have to transform the way that we serve our customers to give them better service and help them grow,” says Ana Echenique, PepsiCo’s senior director for sales strategy and digital transformation in Mexico. “We understand that, in order to continue the growth that we envision for the future, we need to have this transformation in our value chain.”
The app has made a difference for customers like Yazmin Ruiz, an employee at Superteca Hermanos de la Cruz in Mexico City. It lets her place orders on her schedule, whether it’s during a quiet time at the store or after hours when Ruiz can focus on operational tasks. MiNegocio+ offers a range of incentives, from product discounts to loyalty points that can be redeemed on future orders. And orders can be made any hour of the day—in fact, roughly one-third of orders on the app are made outside of regular business hours. “I look for the products I need, put together my order, and that’s it,” Ruiz says. “It’s so much easier.”
DRIVEN BY DATA
While MiNegocio+ has put more control in the hands of customers, it hasn’t eliminated the need for the roughly 18,000 frontline salespeople in Mexico. Instead, the app helps the sales team deliver more value to the stores it works with. Access to a huge trove of data collected and analyzed by AI lets them more accurately suggest products and promotions that will, in turn, help generate more sales for customers. “It was very hard to tell our salespeople that this product will sell well here, but not there,” Evenblij says. “Now, with [this] technology, we’re actually able to get the right product to the right customer and the right consumer.”
Helping mom-and-pop stores grow is one of the primary goals of MiNegocio+ and PepsiConnect. But Kanioura notes that PepsiCo’s digital transformation also aims to give stores of all sizes—and in every global market—the ability to make more informed decisions about the products they stock and the ways they’re sold. “PepsiCo customers around the world vary from small store owners and big global retailers to the snack stores in China and the kiosks in Europe,” she says. “That’s the beauty of the customer ecosystem. We cater to every consumer preference, wherever they want to buy, and at every point of sale.” At Superteca Hermanos de la Cruz, it’s clear that consumers are being well served by the fine-tuned product guidance from the store’s PepsiCo sales rep and the powerful data from the MiNegocio+ app. And as consumers find more of the products they love, the stores also benefit. “Sales have gone up because whenever we run out of stock, we can quickly make an order,” Ruiz says. Fortunately, reordering is just a click away.