Managing a field sales team is no easy task. Businesses and managers encounter numerous challenges and difficulties, including a lack of accurate field information, difficulties in monitoring daily team activities, and frequent communication gaps between managers and the team. In this article, we will explore five challenges that businesses face in managing field sales, along with potential solutions to overcome them.
Contents
What is Field Sales?
Before delving into these challenges, let’s start by understanding the definition of field sales.
Field sales is a sales method in which the sales team directly interacts with potential customers. This team is responsible for promoting products or services face-to-face, understanding customer needs, providing product information, and persuading customers to make a purchase.
In essence, field sales is the frontline of the company in reaching out to customers directly and personally.
5 Challenges in Managing Field Sales
Understanding the challenges in managing field sales teams is crucial to the success of any company. Let’s delve into the difficulties managers often encounter when overseeing field sales teams.
Lack of visibility
One primary challenge for managers is the limited visibility into the activities of the field sales team due to their work being conducted outside the office.Â
Monitoring the interactions between the field team and potential customers and understanding the progress of these engagements becomes challenging.Â
Without suitable systems or technology, managers struggle to gather comprehensive information, making it difficult to make accurate decisions.
Difficulty measuring Productivity
The next challenge for managers is the difficulty in measuring the productivity level of each field salesperson. This cannot be measured solely by the number of visits made by the field sales team in any given month.
For instance, consider a scenario where the manager of Company A assigns two field sales teams to two different areas: one in Area B and the other in Area C. The sales team in Area B makes more visits to potential clients than the team in area C.Â
However, upon further analysis, it becomes apparent that the reason why the team in area C did not make as many visits as team B was due to the long distance between visiting locations, affecting their time efficiency and overall performance.
In addition, differences in workload also contribute to this problem. Therefore, measuring productivity solely by the number of visits is often inadequate and fails to provide an accurate picture of the true productivity of field sales teams.
Communication issues
Field sales involve a lot of travel, which often makes communication between management and the sales team difficult.
This leads to challenges in obtaining up-to-date information on field conditions, sales activities, and obstacles encountered by the sales team.Â
Similarly, the sales team encounters difficulties in receiving guidance, approvals, and prompt decisions from managers. Consequently, the sales teams often lose momentum, which has a negative impact on their productivity and sales results.
Challenges in monitoring sales activity
Managing field sales poses the challenge of tracking the movements of the sales team. Office-based managers cannot directly monitor the activities of the sales team in the field.Â
Consequently, they are unaware of the team’s location changes, the duration spent at each location, or adherence to the planned visit schedule. This lack of visibility makes it challenging for managers to offer timely support and guidance. Without accurate, real-time information, managers cannot effectively evaluate sales team performance or make swift strategic decisions.
Struggles with Adapting to Sudden Changes
Businesses that still manage their field sales teams manually will face difficulties in handling sudden changes.Â
For example, if one of the salespeople suddenly becomes ill and cannot work, then the tasks he should be carrying out must immediately be transferred to another salesperson.Â
Unfortunately, this process can take a long time and be inefficient if done traditionally because it requires coordination and rescheduling.
Key Solutions for Optimizing Field Sales Management
The key to efficient and effective management of field sales is to use technology and systems designed specifically for this purpose.
These technologies come with various features aimed at simplifying the management and monitoring of field sales. For example, field sales teams can input all the information they gather during visits into a mobile app installed on their smartphones.
Managers can then obtain real-time and up-to-date information from this app, allowing them to know what’s happening in the field. This way, managers can make quicker and more accurate decisions based on accurate and current data.Â
Through technology, managers can also easily schedule visits. If a salesperson is unable to work, the manager can quickly reassign their tasks to another salesperson, ensuring that all visits proceed as planned.
Technology helps managers and field sales teams communicate more effectively, which positively impacts productivity. With better communication, tasks are completed more efficiently, avoiding assumptions that are not based on facts and data.
Easily Manage Field Sales Teams with Field Work Optimization Solutions
Field Work Optimization solutions are technologies specifically designed to help businesses manage field sales effectively. This technology integrates with location intelligence and comprehensive location data, allowing businesses to not only monitor and measure the productivity of field sales teams but also to see the coverage areas they reach.
With this detailed information, businesses can plan expansions better, identify areas with potential for rapid growth, and ensure that resources are used efficiently.
Learn more about how Field Work Optimization Solutions can help businesses by contacting email: [email protected] or WA: 087779077750
FAQÂ
What is the role of a field salesperson?
The responsibilities of a field salesperson include identifying potential clients, visiting clients, establishing strong relationships with clients, and providing solutions that meet their needs.
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What is field sales?
Field sales is a sales approach in which the sales team directly engages with potential customers.
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What challenges do managers face in managing field sales?
Managers encounter challenges such as lack of visibility, difficulty in measuring productivity, communication issues, tracking sales movements, and making sudden changes.