Mars Petcare India has been at the forefront of next-generation digital innovation in sales, combining strong leadership, enterprise technology, and AI-led field execution to transform how its sales teams operate.
At the SalesCode.ai CXO Conclave, we were proud to recognise this journey by presenting the Global Excellence Award for Next-Gen Sales AI to the Mars Petcare India team. The award celebrates an organisation that has moved beyond experimenting with AI for sales and has begun applying it meaningfully across day-to-day sales execution, target achievement, and field-force productivity.
Recognising Mars Petcare India’s Digital Leadership
Mars Petcare India has been among the early adopters of AI for sales teams, using next-generation digital capabilities to strengthen field sales planning and execution. This journey has been spearheaded under the leadership of Jagadeesh Konathala, Chief Digital Information Officer, PN Asia, whose vision has helped bring advanced digital innovation closer to the realities of frontline sales. For us at SalesCode.ai, this award was an opportunity to celebrate an organisation that has implemented AI-led sales transformation at scale and connected it directly with the everyday priorities of its sales representatives. The recognition was not simply for adopting new technology. It was for applying technology to make sales execution more focused, personalised, and actionable.
Turning AI-Generated Targets Into Field Execution
One of the most important aspects of the Mars Petcare India transformation has been the use of AI-generated sales targets together with AI-generated tasks designed to help field teams achieve those targets. In a traditional Sales Force Automation environment, targets are often communicated at a broad territory, distributor, or sales-representative level. The frontline team is then expected to determine how those targets should translate into specific actions across hundreds of outlets and sales calls. An AI-led SFA approach can close this gap by connecting sales objectives with clear execution priorities. For Mars Petcare India, AI-generated targets were supported by personalised tasks that helped translate business goals into relevant actions for individual sales representatives, calls, and stores. This is where AI in Sales Force Automation becomes valuable. It moves beyond dashboards and reporting to help answer a more practical question: What should each sales representative do during the next store visit to move closer to the target?
Hyper-Personalised Tasks for Every Sales Call
With AI at its core, SalesCode.ai’s next-generation SFA capabilities supported Mars Petcare India with hyper-personalised recommendations for each sales representative, each call, and each store. Rather than giving every field salesperson the same generic recommendation, the system could create tasks aligned with the context of a particular outlet and sales opportunity. The execution model included three important categories of personalised tasks.
Cross-Sell Recommendation Tasks
Hyper-personalised cross-sell tasks helped sales representatives identify relevant opportunities to expand the assortment sold within an outlet. These recommendations were generated at the level of the individual sales representative, store, and call, making the guidance more actionable during the field visit. Instead of relying only on a representative’s memory or a static product list, the task could direct attention towards a relevant cross-sell opportunity based on the sales context already available.
Recovery Tasks
Hyper-personalised recovery tasks helped sales representatives focus on opportunities that required renewed attention. Recovery can be an essential part of FMCG and CPG field sales execution. When a product, order, or commercial opportunity is missed, the value is not created merely by recording the gap in a dashboard. The gap must be translated into an action for the person who can address it. By assigning recovery tasks for specific sales representatives, calls, and stores, the system helped bring those opportunities back into the field-execution workflow.
Focus Product Tasks
Hyper-personalised focus product tasks helped direct each sales representative towards the products that required priority during a particular store visit. In complex FMCG and CPG portfolios, the same product cannot be treated as the highest priority for every outlet. A product that is relevant for one store may not represent the same opportunity in another. Outlet-level focus product tasks made the recommendation more contextual and helped the sales team concentrate on the most relevant action during each call. Together, these cross-sell, recovery, and focus product recommendations demonstrated how AI could be embedded within SFA to support practical retail execution rather than operate as a separate analytics layer.
From Sales Data to Next-Best Actions
The larger shift represented by this implementation is the movement from sales data visibility to sales actionability. Most enterprise sales systems can capture information about outlets, orders, routes, products, sales representatives, and target achievement. However, data alone does not tell a field salesperson what to do next. AI-led sales execution connects information with action by using available sales context to generate a clear recommendation. For a field sales team, that recommendation may involve: Expanding the assortment in a store Recovering a missed sales opportunity Prioritising a focus product during the visit Aligning daily execution with an AI-generated target This is especially relevant in FMCG and CPG Route-to-Market operations, where sales outcomes depend on thousands of decisions made across territories, routes, distributors, outlets, and individual calls. By embedding recommendations inside the sales workflow, AI can help enterprise sales teams turn commercial strategy into consistent field execution.
Celebrating the Mars Petcare India Team
Enterprise transformation is never delivered by technology or leadership alone. It is brought to life by the teams responsible for execution. Our heartfelt congratulations and thanks go to the Mars Petcare India team for its leadership and remarkable execution, including: Sandeep Deshwal Sri Vidya Immalraju Lavanya Selvaraj Their contribution helped convert the vision for next-generation sales into an operational reality. The Global Excellence Award for Next-Gen Sales AI recognises both the ambition behind the transformation and the disciplined execution required to make it work across the sales organisation.
