The missing millions: how National Lottery operator Allwyn turned rep capability into a revenue lever it can pull

There is a scratch card rack in almost every shop in Britain. The corner shop, the petrol station, the supermarket by the roundabout. One company sits behind all of it, and a field team of 200 people is responsible for every one of those racks.

They work the way field reps have always worked. Eight store visits a day. A territory. A call file that changes weekly. Long stretches of driving in between. Some of them have been doing it for twenty years.

Allwyn knew exactly which shops were underperforming. Toby Taylor-Freestone had built CityMapper, a weekly diagnosis of the entire estate — sales by game, dispenser fill, a ten-question standards audit, every store scored and segmented. The diagnosis was excellent. The distribution of it was two analysts, hand-serving a field force of 200.

So the gap sat there. Scratch card sales had drifted down over several years, and the distance between what the estate was selling and what it could sell had opened into the tens of millions of pounds a week. Allwyn could name that gap precisely. Closing it meant one thing: 200 people having a different conversation at the counter. And that was the one variable in the equation nobody could see, measure, or move.

The old tools said as much. A weekly written briefing went out to the field; reps did not read it. Routing was run off a spreadsheet that could send a rep an hour across town to reach a shop down the road. Training was a classroom and a role play with your manager, which works at ten people and stops working at two hundred. When Retail Capability Manager Laura Prince asked the field to send in the objections they were actually hearing at the counter, she wrote to 125 reps. Ten replied.

To close a gap it could measure but not move, Allwyn turned to SecondBody.