Every good field team manager constantly looks for ways to improve his effectiveness and productivity. Managing a team of field sales reps involves dealing with many people, at many different locations, bringing in a lot of information on many products. Field reps schedule, territory management, task execution, inventory levels, customer relationships, sales figures, and marketing data – it often looks like too many balls in the air.
In most of the companies corporate data is typically spread out over multiple channels, which means a field team manager has to constantly move from one system to another, without having a comprehensive picture of retail conditions. Besides, field team managers often spend a lot of time solving issues at points of sales that require their attention. Adding to these the need to regularly create reports on sales figures and field team performance, we can easily understand why field team managers have no time and enthusiasm to analyze retail data to get valuable insights for strategic decisions.
The good news is that today with the development of mobile technology, Cloud storage and personal mobile devices, a field team manager can afford being more effective without spending much effort. The key step is to organize your sales data in one place, making it easy to access, manage, analyze, transfer and share. To find the right place for your corporate data, look for comprehensive field team management software solutions, which allow managing all the information on customers and products, monitoring of field reps, and field sales operations, organizing retail auditing, merchandising and field marketing activities, and analyzing various types of data to create automatic reports. The more comprehensive field team management solution you have, the more time you can save, when there is no need to constantly move from one data storage system to another.
If you want to improve the efficiency of your field team management, look for all-in-one solutions that offer the following opportunities:
- Manage customers, products and mobile users
- Plan retail visits in bulk and in advance
- Create task templates for everything that needs to be checked
- Process product orders and returns
- Easily assign and re-assign territories between field reps
- Monitor field team activities live on the map
- Optimize field reps’ routes
- Communicate through built-in messenger if necessary
- Get real-time data as soon as it is collected
- Get GPS-confirmation of executed visits and tasks
- Analyze data, captured at points of sales via built-in analytic tools
Today there is great variety of field team management software solutions on the market, which makes difficult to find the one that best fits your company. To get from the software the exact features and opportunities you need, analyze your key business operations that your need to automate and different types of data you manage. Determining what has top priority for your business is the key to improving field team management efficiency by organizing your data in the most sophisticated way.
To try a comprehensive field team management software solution free of charge, sign up at www.visitbasis.com or book a free online demo to see how it works. Check out our previous articles to get more information about field team management.
To try our data collection software for free register at www.visitbasis.com and download the VisitBasis Retail Audit App FREE on Google Play or App Store. To learn more about how our field merchandising system works request a demo or check the links below to watch the demo videos.
