How to grow sales from improved field sales team productivity

Hands up if you have experienced what feels like wasted hours on email trails and spreadsheets, entering data and trying to find the piece of information that eludes you.

We understand that feeling having experienced it directly and seen the lost opportunities in retail execution from what feels like wasted, unproductive time. Your priorities are to get your field sales team in front of clients and shelves begging for your brands, but inevitably there are times when administration tasks take over.

What if we said that with standardised templates, consistent reporting processes and automatic consolidation of field retail data, your time could be more productive. Now wouldn’t that sound like a better use of time for your team in the field?

We aren’t saying that there is a magic wand that will make all the admin time disappear. But what we are saying is that with the right retail execution systems in place, it can be reduced and used to your advantage to learn more. With efficient data capture comes timely reporting, and that gives you and your team the knowledge you need to deliver against your KPIs.

There is also the matter of data accuracy. If data is being gathered from multiple sources, if it is having to be entered multiple times into different systems, and if it is being manually consolidated, errors will inevitably happen. Then consider the importance of that information for decision making, and the risk of inaccuracies becomes one that isn’t acceptable.

With standardised forms and consistent templates that sync automatically, ambiguity and data inaccuracies are less likely. Not only that, with standardised forms the effort to complete them is considerably reduced.

Minimum input, maximum output

If at any point you need to second guess what is needed, or what a data point means, that is unnecessary effort. If at any point your field sales team need to double handle data, that is unnecessary effort. If at any point your head office team need to re-enter data into other spreadsheets, that is unnecessary effort.

So imagine you want a photo of the product on shelf. The field sales rep takes a photo, attaches it to an email, you open the email, save the photo into another database, that’s a lot of clicking, and wasted time.

Now imagine your field rep opens an app, snaps the photo and you have access to it immediately through your retail software. Quicker? More efficient?

That is where a system like Repsly comes in with its built-in agile reporting and custom forms for your sales team to track what’s happening in the field across their accounts. Forms can be designed on Repsly to meet your needs and capture the data that is most pertinent to your business.

Create reports that measure what you want to improve

What do you need to know to do a great job? That’s the perfect starting point to create these forms and templates so that everyone has access to the same information at the same time. Consistency leads to efficiency, and with efficiency comes reduced costs and dare we say it, sales opportunities.

Saving time on one task gives you and your team time to spend in on other tasks like finding new clients, new territories or new customers, after all that is where the revenue return is. It frees up time to try new things, backed up by strong data and sound information, to see what works. If it does deliver a return, great, you can easily replicate what has been done across your territory utilising the consistent reports and processes you have created.

If the activity doesn’t work, you haven’t wasted a lot of time or money so it’s not a great risk to the business, and any key learnings can be easily communicated through the team. Perhaps those findings may inspire someone else in another territory to try something new which could be the breakthrough your team needs.

Painting a clear picture of your sales performance doesn’t need to take as long as an oil painting. Simple replicable forms, data that automatically synchs across the business and agile reporting enable your field teams to focus on what will make the biggest difference to sales, not on making a report look flashy.

It’s a simple step to move from saved time, to agile reporting, to sales opportunities and it is a simple step from reading this blog to booking a demo with Repsly to see what opportunities it can open up for your business. Get in touch today for a more productive tomorrow.