FMCG/CPG metric
What is strike rate and how it is measured
Strike rate is a field team indicator: the share of visits to retail outlets that ended in a placed order, out of all visits in the period. It is computed by employee, outlet, territory or sales channel and shows how productive a visit was, not how much was sold.
- SFA: field sales automation
- Analytics & BI for Distribution Decisions
In detail
The indicator answers a question that neither sales volume nor visit count shows on its own: how many arrivals at a retail outlet end in an order. A team can meet its visit plan and miss its sales plan, and the other way round - strike rate separates those two pictures.
It measures whether a visit produced a result, not the quality of the visit and not the revenue. A single-line order and an order covering the whole assortment matrix land in the numerator alike, so strike rate is read together with the order value, the number of items in it and matrix compliance, rather than instead of them.
The indicator has no universal target value, and naming one here would be an invention: it depends on the channel, on the formats of the outlets, on visit frequency and on what a given company counts as a visit. So strike rate is compared with the same team’s earlier periods and between employees on comparable territories, and not against an outside reference.
The definition itself makes the indicator easy to spoil. If only completed visits reach the denominator, skipped outlets disappear from the calculation. If orders placed outside a visit reach the numerator, the value rises without a single change in the field.
How it is measured
- The numerator is visits that produced an order. The denominator is visits in the same period; which of them - planned or completed - is fixed in the definition of the indicator before it is first computed.
- One period is chosen for the whole team, otherwise employees are compared on different grounds.
- Views of the calculation: employee, retail outlet, route, territory, sales channel, product category.
- Cancelled and unshipped orders are taken out of the numerator where an order counts on shipment rather than on being placed.
- The fact of a visit is confirmed by the visit’s own data - its time, its GPS location and the completed checklist - so the denominator is not assembled from what the employee says.
- Values by employee and by outlet are shown in reports and on KPI dashboards next to plan achievement, which is where a drop becomes visible.