Increase Visit Coverage And Profits Through Your FMCG Sales Reps: A Complete Guide
Use Fieldproxy sales CRM for your FMCG sales reps, and generate orders faster than ever before. Learn how rigth now.
Shoaib Ahmed
5 minutes
October 12, 2024
What's On This Page
Introduction
How To Increase My Team’s Sales
Capacity planning for my teams
Scheduling visits for your sales reps
Using real-time location tracking of my teams
Automate order tracking for my agents
Why Is Tracking My Outside Sales Teams Important?
Closing Thoughts
About Fieldproxy
I wrote an article a long time back that I need to revisit and correct. It’s about inside sales vs outside sales and I’d taken a stance saying that both inside sales and outside sales are important to an organization, and outside sales even more so.
I’ll be editing that article to change my stance a bit to state that outside sales is not just a little more important, it’s about 3.2x more impactful and outside sales reps play a pivotal role in directing the growth of any organization. The FMCG industry more so than any other industry.
In this article we’re going to take a look at how you can leverage your existing outside sales teams and field agents to increase your sales if you’re in the FMCG sector, and learn how just making a few tweaks to how you manage your agents goes a long way into reaping long-term rewards for your business. Let’s dive right into it.
Increasing sales for your business goes hand-in-hand with improving salesmanship, and there is no better tactic to improving salesmanship than having your salespeople do a lot of reps. Volume is key, so we just need to have your teams get exposed to as many sales scenarios as possible
How do you do that? Simple, have your field teams double down on their outside sales leads. Visit more customers on a daily basis, make more upsell attempts, generate more opportunities.
You cannot, of course, do any of this unless you don’t have a track of what your teams are doing in the first place. So before anything else, have the data to confidently impress your new ideas and changes upon your sales teams.
Once you have the data, you can then begin challenging the patterns, cadences, sequences, even “tricks” that have been exchanged between all your teams, and pick out what works and what doesn’t, then introduce technology to scale that. That’s how you build an amazing sales team that generates tremendous value for your customers, and huge revenue numbers for you.
We’ve talked about some FMCG sales tactics in our blog here, so be sure to check that out, and if you’ve already got that part sorted out, let’s take a look at how tech can help solve everything else for you.
Implement Capacity Planning
One of the biggest leverages you’ve got with technology for FMCG teams is the ability to plan and manage your resources in the most effective way possible.
Business gurus and your hotshot consultants like to complicate this by calling it capacity planning, where you “forecast potential needs of a project, laying out processes and strategies to measure the gap in resource allocation and find alignements with demand” - really, it’s just smartly allocating your agents so you don’t have to rack your brains with untimed customer requests later on.
With capacity planning, you’re using technology and your resources to find out who’s available for what job, how well suited they are for a particular job, whether they have the bandwidth to handle more jobs, and being able to monitor them in real-time when all of this is happening. And yes, all of this can be taken care of with a single capacity planning software - welcome to 2024
We’ve written a whole detailed article on capacity planning, so you can check that out, but the concept really just revolves around five key tactics:
Another big hassle for FMCG teams where technology makes lives easier is visit scheduling. Once you have enough data on how your teams operate, you can simply upload this information into a route optimization software and it will start allocating jobs to resources from that point on.
Let’s take an example from our one of clients’ use cases. One of our clients at Fieldproxy uses Fieldproxy to streamline their sales agents, using location intelligence (we’ll get to this in a bit) to figure out which agent needs to make visits to which customers, and record a sale if needed.
So what they did when they started out was, upload a list of their customer database and their agent information - stuff like their past sales history with the organization, base location, and whatnot.
Once all of the necessary information was available, Fieldproxy took a look at the agent data, took a look at the customer information, and started mapping out agent proximity to customer location. What happens once you do this is, you get different territories created inside the system assigned to these agents, and now whenever an order request is recorded or a site visit is scheduled by the manager, Fieldproxy will immediately suggest an agent that is best suited for the job.
And just like that, visit scheduling for your teams became child’s play. Imagine that - just uploading a couple sheets, and your system does everything else for you. How much time do you think that would save for your backend teams per year. How much more revenue can your sales teams be making? The potential is limitless - That’s what we’re trying to help teams with at Fieldproxy. So if you’ve got a field team, book a free demo today
Use Location Intelligence
This is huge if you’re planning on having a real-time monitoring solution for your field teams. What this does is use the Fieldproxy mobile app to provide managers with an up-to-date geolocation facility, enabling you to see exactly what your agents have been up to.
Using location intelligence will also give you a complete drilldown on everything your agents have been up to, logging the important stuff, and tracking everything else.
Order taking for sales agents is still a complication for many FMCG organizations, despite having so many applications dedicated to solving this. A major reason for this is because businesses take simple order cataloguing processes too far, to the point where it’s more of an ecommerce platform than a product catalog on your mobile phone.
Let’s break it down and keep this really simple for your FMCG teams. For FMCG sales teams, their day-to-day operation involves visiting customers, doing a stock check, and taking down orders for your customers.
And yes, again, you can use a single mobile app to take down your FMCG sales orders - no brownie points for guessing which one it is.
Using an online product catalog for your FMCG sales teams works twofold - one, it makes order taking for your field teams a piece of cake, and two, these orders can be immediately mapped and sent to your backend CRM, generate an invoice, and have it sent to the customer for a faster payment process.
True Visibility Over Your Operations
With features like real-time location intelligence, and agent visibility throughout the sales journey, both managers and distributors get an idea of where your agents are, what they’ve been doing, and the status of orders, at the click of a button.
This helps organizations greatly with predicting and charting forecasts from their secondary sales execution, in real-time.
Next Step In Inventory Management And Supply Chain Management
When you’ve got intelligent AI-based stock and order scheduling to make sure every piece of company inventory is accounted for, you gain insights on how and where you can deploy them better, which regions and agents are pushing out stock faster, and how the entire supply chain strategy that you have in place is faring for your organization.
With a distributor management system in place, you truly have the next level of inventory and supply chain management at your fingertips. Get onboarded today!
Cut Down Drastically On Operational Costs
With more accurate data-backed decisions made in the right direction, your organizations
can cut down operational costs by a lot. Our clients at Fieldproxy that have deployed a distributor management system have typically seen a drop in spending across their operations by 15% over a quarter.
Smarter Time And Resource Allocation Across The Board
Streamlining all your manual effort leads to your resources and agents having more time to focus on other important stuff, and get more done every single day. This typically results in an increase in productive work done across the board, and that just makes more money for everybody, so why not?
A Little Bit About Fieldproxy
As businesses expand and operations grow more complex, managing field teams can be a daunting task. From managing tickets to scheduling jobs and everything in between, keeping track of everything can be time-consuming and inefficient. That's where Fieldproxy comes in - an end-to-end field team management solution that aims to simplify these tasks and streamline operations.
Distributor Management Solutions By Fieldproxy
Fieldproxy's Distributor Management Solutions leverage AI and smart sheets to optimize inventory management, order processing, and supply chain visibility. It helps you improve communication between manufacturers and distributors, promoting better issue resolution times and faster deliveries.
With real-time data analytics, businesses can make informed decisions, minimize stockouts, and enhance overall productivity. It’s worked for 250+ clients across the globe, it will work for your business too. Get a free demo today!
Another important aspect of Fieldproxy is its job scheduling feature. With this tool, businesses can schedule jobs and assign them to field teams in real-time. This helps ensure that the right team is on the job at the right time, which can save businesses time and money.
Generate Quotes And Estimates
Fieldproxy also offers a mobile application that allows field teams to generate quotes and estimates on the go. This is particularly useful for businesses that operate in industries where quotes and estimates are necessary, such as construction or landscaping. With this feature, businesses can provide accurate quotes to their customers quickly and easily.
In addition to generating quotes and estimates, the Fieldproxy mobile application also allows businesses to raise invoices and facilitate payment collections through integrations with popular payment gateways. This can help businesses get paid faster and with less hassle.
Collect Valuable Customer Feedback
With features like customer happiness index, and historical customer data, ensure your customers are always satisfied with your products and services. Know exactly how your customers operate and provide better quality services.
Fieldproxy’s easily-presentable data dashboards and reports allow managers to make sense of all the data their field teams collect, in real time.
Create, curate, and manage different dashboards and reports to help make better data-backed decisions for your service teams.
There’s always going to be visits that clash with your agents’ schedules or that are of immediate attention. Question is, will your current route management process be prepared to handle it? If not, then you might want to consider shifting to a new system.
The old way to go about this would be taking a look at all your visits scheduled for the day and find out which agent has more time on their hands, then see if they’re closer to the client’s place and schedule a visit.
At Fieldproxy, we do things a bit different. All you have to do is, head over to Fieldproxy’s AI visual builder, ask it a question, and it will show you actionable data for you to interact with, in 5 seconds.
You instantly know who’s available and who’s not, and allocating tasks to your agents becomes child’s play. The point is, if you’re not able to prioritize your visits for your agents, you will have a hard time scaling your operations.
Closing Thoughts
So why should businesses consider Fieldproxy? With its comprehensive set of features, Fieldproxy can help businesses save time, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction. And with a free demo available, there's no reason not to give it a try.
If you're looking for an end-to-end field team management solution that can help you manage tickets, schedule jobs, generate quotes and estimates, raise invoices, and collect payments while also providing customer feedback support, then Fieldproxy might be the solution for you. Book a free demo today to see how Fieldproxy can help your business improve its operations and customer satisfaction.
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