Beat Plan

Every salesman in India has a beat plan, a list of shops and the days he must visit them. Anubhav Nanda began his career on one as a young P&G manager in coastal Andhra Pradesh, armed with a spreadsheet for every problem. Fifteen years later, he was running Grocery and Quick Commerce for Amazon India. Beat Plan is the story of what he learnt in between.A pack of Surf Excel goes live on Amazon for ₹82,740, and ninety people buy it. A wholesaler wins an argument over five paise with a Citizen calculator and a very confident number. A Tide pack loses its customers over a single missing coin. A sales head's visit to a village is mistaken for a tax raid, and a flooded highway is crossed with a borrowed job title, a white Ambassador and two unlucky fish.Warm, funny and often moving, these field stories travel from kirana counters and distributor godowns to dark stores and ten-minute delivery. They show how Indian retail really runs: on trust, on the rhythm of the household, and on knowing what is in the customer's purse. Running through them all is Venky, the man who called the author "KAM sar" and taught him most of what mattered.For anyone who has carried a sales target, built a product for Bharat, or wondered how a billion people get their groceries every day.