If you are a sales rep looking for how to become more effective, you’ve probably already read a bunch of articles on the Web, listing Five, Six, Seven, Ten and even 24 Apps Every Sales Rep Needs on Their Phone. The list of the essential mobile applications for field sales reps include apps that play multimedia presentations on mobile devices, keep track of the miles you drive for business, generate invoices and time sheets, create mobile dashboards of various kinds of available information, create text notes, store your data in the Cloud, provide electronic signatures and so on and so forth. So, how many apps a sales rep has to install to become more effective? Actually, the answer is one. The shortest way to increase productivity of outside sales reps is to empower them with an up-to-date all-in-one application for field sales, which allows managing all field sales activities from one place.
Despite all of the listed features are really important for sales reps productivity, nobody can guarantee that if they install all “the essential mobile applications for sales reps” they will become more efficient and productive. Moreover, the result can be the opposite. An outside sales rep is constantly on the go and has to deal with a lot of people and data from different retail locations. If a sales rep has to constantly switch between “the most important applications”, he can easily miss a comprehensive picture of retail conditions or even blunder away some critically important events and details if he forgot to run the appropriate app.
The simple solution to this problem is to organize your sales data and sales tools in one place, making it easy to access, manage, analyze, transfer and share. Today there are many all-in-one field sales applications on the market that allow sales reps to manage sales operations, product and customer databases, communicate with the office, send reports and analyze retail performance. To choose between numerous applications for sales reps, analyze your everyday work routines, so you can understand, what features you are looking for. Although the choice of an app for sales reps depends on specific needs and everyday activities, we still can identify the main features that a comprehensive field sales mobile app should provide:
- Order taking – The main job of sales reps is selling, so this is the most important thing to be automated. Mobile order forms and automated data entry allow submitting orders very quickly, so a sales rep can be more effective taking more orders per day.
- Scheduling visits – A comprehensive field sales apps allow field reps to see the visits and tasks planned by the office, schedule retail visits on the go, if they need to squeeze an extra visit for the day, add tasks to visits and optimize travel routes.
- Mobile tools for retail data collection – Automated task templates, barcode scanner, built-in notes and photo reports, electronic signatures, multi-stock lists allow field reps to easily collect store data, reducing data-entry time and minimizing mistakes.
- Cloud data storage – The up-to-date field sales applications run in the Cloud, so both field sales reps and the office managers have 24/7 access to information from anywhere. Cloud service allows working with big amounts of data, spending less time to aggregating, transferring and sharing information.
- Offline capabilities – The most sophisticated applications for sales reps allows capturing store data even offline to synchronize it when Internet connection is available.
- Automatic synchronization – This feature allows field sales reps to report back without spending a minute or visiting the office. All the data collected, including orders/returns, photos, and text notes is instantly transferred to corporate database and available to office managers.
The days are long gone when increasing sales reps’ productivity meant installing a dozen of applications or a bulky and expensive CRM system. In today’s mobile-driven world it’s possible to find an all-in-one mobile solution for field reps that makes short work of common sales tasks. To get one of these free, register at www.visitbasis.com
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.
