Item: Samaaro
Rating: 4.9

Key Takeaways(TL;DR)

Scale breaks without a unified system:
One platform centralizes logistics, communication, and engagement across 500+ attendees and multiple business units

Personalization drives adoption:
Individual itineraries, AI videos, and segment-specific experiences keep attendees engaged before, during, and after the event

Centralized communication removes chaos:
One structured layer across channels ensures consistent updates, reduces noise, and reaches the right audience instantly

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Bottom Line: Sales kickoffs are now operating systems, while platforms replace fragmented execution with predictable, personalized, and measurable event experiences at scale.

Overview

PepsiCo, one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies, operates a vast sales network spanning multiple regional units across India and Bangladesh. To energize its sales force and set the tone for the year ahead, PepsiCo Foods organized its annual Territory Sales Manager (TSM) Kickoff , a multi-day offsite in Pattaya, Thailand, held from 15–17 January 2026. With 500+ confirmed attendees flying in from six business units, the event needed to deliver a premium, app-first experience that kept every attendee informed, engaged, and celebrated, from the moment they received their invite to the closing day of the summit.

Industry

FMCG / Consumer Goods

Solutions Used

Attendee Mobile App, Multi-Channel Communications (Email + WhatsApp), Travel & Itinerary Management, Reception & QR Check-In Dashboards, Session Management

Industry Reality

In real estate and other relationship-led B2B industries, over 70% of high-value partnerships are influenced by in-person interactions, yet fewer than 30% of companies can clearly measure how events impact customer engagement or loyalty.

As event programs scale across regions and formats, teams often track registrations and attendance, but struggle to connect participation with deeper outcomes like product adoption, repeat usage, or long-term customer value. The result is a gap between effort and insight. Events continue to consume significant budget and time, while their true business impact remains difficult to quantify.

For organizations running frequent, high-touch B2B events, closing this measurement gap has become as important as executing the events themselves.

Did You Know? The average annual sales kickoff costs enterprises $3,000–$5,000 per attendee, yet most companies still rely on scattered emails, WhatsApp groups, and printed itineraries to coordinate them.

When 500+ team members from six business units across India and Bangladesh converge at an international offsite, the experience cannot afford to feel fragmented. Every missed update, every inaccessible document, every disengaged attendee represents a lost opportunity to align the entire sales force for the year ahead.

That’s exactly what PepsiCo Foods set out to solve with their TSM Kickoff 2026.

The Challenge : A Multi-Unit International Offsite with Zero Room for Friction

Organizing PepsiCo’s annual sales kickoff in Pattaya, Thailand meant coordinating attendees from six distinct business units, each with their own travel logistics, session tracks, and recognition programs. The organizing team faced three core challenges:

1. Personalized Logistics at Scale for an International Offsite

With 500+ attendees flying from different cities, each person had unique flight details, hotel vouchers, and travel documents. The team needed a centralized, mobile-first platform where every attendee could instantly access their own logistics information, eliminating reliance on scattered emails, travel agent follow-ups, and last-minute WhatsApp coordination.

2. Fragmented Coordination Across Six Business Units with No Unified Communication Layer

With six business units operating independently, each with their own internal coordination channels, there was no single communication layer to ensure consistent messaging. RSVP tracking, travel updates, schedule changes, and on-ground logistics were being managed in silos, creating coordination noise and increasing the risk of missed or conflicting information reaching attendees.

3. Segmented Experiences for Specialized Groups, In Real Time
The event wasn’t one-size-fits-all. PepsiCo had distinct attendee segments, one for women in sales, a category for top performers being recognized mid-event, and the VVIP leadership group. Each segment needed tailored content, targeted notifications, and exclusive moments, all managed dynamically during a live, multi-day event.

The Solution: A Unified Event Platform That Became PepsiCo's Operating System for the Kickoff

Samaaro delivered a fully customized event platform, anchored by a branded mobile attendee app, that served as the single operating system for attendee communication, logistics access, on-ground coordination, and engagement across all six business units.

AI-Personalized Video from Leadership (Vitra Integration)

On first login, every attendee was greeted with a personalized video message from PepsiCo’s sales leadership, addressing them by name. Built through Samaaro’s integration with Vitra. After the event, the welcome video was swapped to a personalized thank-you message, extending the experience beyond the final day and reinforcing the personal connection with leadership.

Social Feed, Gamified Leaderboard & Session-Level Engagement Controls

A built-in social wall enabled attendees to post photos, like, and comment throughout the event, with a real-time leaderboard ranking participants based on engagement, driving healthy competition and award-worthy participation. At the agenda level, Samaaro gave PepsiCo granular control over engagement: for specific sessions, the organizing team could disable the social feed during keynotes to maintain audience focus, and trigger targeted pop-up notifications for specific ticket types attending that session, ensuring the right message reached the right audience at the right time.

Segment-Specific Pop-Ups Dynamic Ticket Management

Using ticket-type-based segmentation, PepsiCo delivered exclusive in-app experiences to each group. One group received a dedicated pop-up about their breakfast session, another received a mid-event recognition pop-up upon being dynamically reassigned to their new ticket type, and celebrity guest notifications drove social feed activity and leaderboard engagement. Samaaro’s bulk ticket upload feature enabled the team to shift ticket types for hundreds of attendees at once as segments evolved throughout the event.

Centralized Multi-Channel Communications

Samaaro replaced scattered, unit-by-unit coordination with a structured communication cadence across email and WhatsApp, covering RSVP invitations, registration confirmations, app download prompts, segment-specific invites, and personalized video delivery. A single communication layer improved messaging consistency across all six units and reduced coordination noise for the organizing team.

Attendance Predictability & On-Ground Operations

Samaaro’s RSVP and registration system gave PepsiCo high planning confidence well before the event, reducing last-minute follow-ups across units. On the ground, multiple QR-based reception dashboards enabled real-time check-ins, session attendance tracking, and gift distribution management, providing operational visibility across every touchpoint.

The Impact

A Moment from the Field

After a flagship trade show generating over a thousand leads, the marketing team prepared post-event follow-ups within days instead of weeks. Leads were already segmented by product interest, synced into Salesforce, and aligned with approved budgets and pipeline views.

Instead of assembling reports across multiple tools, leadership reviewed event performance through a single dashboard while sales teams moved directly into relevant, product-led conversations. The event closed with clarity, not cleanup.

Real-Life Impact: From Fragmented Coordination to a Repeatable Operating Model

PepsiCo Foods TSM 2026 established what a centralized event operating system looks like for multi-unit programs. With 96.6% RSVP certainty, 561 attendees with itinerary access before arrival, and measurable engagement throughout the event, Samaaro replaced fragmented coordination with a single platform that delivered predictability, personalization, and structured engagement at scale.

The Bigger Picture: Why Sales Kickoffs Are Becoming Platform-Driven Experiences

The sales kickoff is evolving from a straightforward offsite into a high-stakes alignment event where organizations set the energy, targets, and culture for the entire year. As companies scale their teams across geographies, the coordination complexity grows, but most still manage these events with a patchwork of emails, WhatsApp groups, and manual tracking. The result: inconsistent experiences, no engagement data, and zero repeatability.

Leading FMCG, technology, and enterprise organizations are shifting toward centralized event platforms that unify communications, personalize the attendee journey, and generate measurable outcomes. What PepsiCo’s TSM Kickoff demonstrates is that this shift doesn’t require months of planning, with the right platform, a complex multi-unit international offsite can go from brief to go-live in weeks and still deliver the predictability and measurability that modern sales organizations expect.

👉 Planning a large-scale sales kickoff or offsite? Let’s talk about how Samaaro can help you turn it into a measurable, repeatable growth event.

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Powering a High-Energy Sales Kickoff: How PepsiCo Delivered a Seamless, App-First Offsite Experience for 500+ Team Members Across Six Business Units

Key Takeaways(TL;DR)

Overview

Industry

Solutions Used

Industry Reality

Did You Know? The average annual sales kickoff costs enterprises $3,000–$5,000 per attendee, yet most companies still rely on scattered emails, WhatsApp groups, and printed itineraries to coordinate them.

The Challenge : A Multi-Unit International Offsite with Zero Room for Friction

1. Personalized Logistics at Scale for an International Offsite

The Solution: A Unified Event Platform That Became PepsiCo's Operating System for the Kickoff

The Impact

RSVP Acceptance Rate

App Adoption

Social Wall Engagement

A Moment from the Field

Real-Life Impact: From Fragmented Coordination to a Repeatable Operating Model

The Bigger Picture: Why Sales Kickoffs Are Becoming Platform-Driven Experiences

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