Five Key Performance Indicators For Field Sales Managers To Monitor

What's on this page

• The Importance of Keeping Field Sales Metrics
• ---Mean Time To Complete
• ---Percentage Of Problems Resolved On First Visit
• ---Technician Idle Time
• ---Customer Retention
• So, How Can Fieldproxy Help?

The Importance Of Keeping Field Sales Metrics

Do you ever wonder how effective your field sales reps are? Here's a thought - Does your sales team know what their points of measure are and on which scale to measure their performance against, or are they just going about it without even knowing where the touchdown is? If so, then maybe it would help in understanding what kind of metrics are used on field service experts and how those metrics are measured, so field managers can use them to keep a better track of their team and learn how they can improve their employees’ performance.

What if we told you there are metrics that any field sales manager can easily monitor in their work environment? And, what if I told you they're the same metrics that you should be monitoring as a field service manager to make sure your team is operating at peak performance? Plus, what if we told you all these field metrics could be monitored from an app from anywhere across the world. That’s exactly what Fieldproxy does.

The fact is, every frontline person needs to understand how important it is to keep certain performance metrics on hand. They need them for planning and goal setting. It's helpful for them to see where they stand now, and where they could go with a little more effort. Field sales managers use these types of indicators with their reps, so why not make them available to the field service manager? Sales reps feel accountable when they are held to a certain standard and so do field service technicians. It just works, and that is why it is important.

This article points out five key metrics that are actually helpful in decluttering needless information and getting rid of noise, helping your teams focus on things that matter.

Mean Time To Complete

Right off the bat, Mean time to complete (MTTC) is one of the most important metrics to measure your field teams. You can think of this as the average time taken for a field team to complete any given job. This time will include the average work hours calculated from when the technician arrived on site right through to when they left after resolving the problem and returning all tools and equipment into stock. It doesn't matter if that time is up-sold or not because the reality is people expect things done quickly but don't appreciate massively oversized jobs where there's too much time spent on the job for little return.

The mean time to complete includes not only all-time tracked in the field but also any phone calls and internal work done as well. It might be that you've got a technician who is completing tickets fast but at what cost? If they're spending all their time behind a desk filling out forms and outsourcing jobs, then you may want to think about rearranging or altering some of your processes so they can get out more often. That is how MTTC helps your sales team optimize its work.

Percentage Of Problems Resolved On First Visit

This will tell us how many times it took a business just one trip to fix its problem. There are several reasons why someone would expect it to below. One reason might be that if the company is focused on speed of delivery, then they don't care about how tasks are completed as long as they get done quickly. Another reason might be that they have a field team that already has phone calls and internal work queued up for them, in which case you can’t take into account all those issues when calculating this metric.

It is a complicated metric that involves a lot of moving parts and getting even the slightest factor neglected can cause a lot of wrong metrics to be fed into the system. This can lead to more setbacks than if you hadn’t initially even taken the metric into account. Having an automated field service management system can help you by a great margin for calculating these percentages.

Technician Idle Time

Technician idle time is also important to know about so that we can make sure our remote workers are being used to their full capacity. Time spent unassigned in most ticketing systems counts as downtime for a technician but I prefer to see it as time spent planning, reviewing and doing other things that will be of benefit to the technician in the long term.

For instance, if they've got an hour or two ahead of them before their next job requires their attention, then it would be great to see them spending some time reaching out on social media with customised messages to build up a bigger and more responsive audience for when you need to promote services. Or perhaps by working on creating new sales presentations or mechanisms for generating leads. If we can make use of this idle time, we’ll be saving money on staffing requirements and ultimately spend less money recruiting replacements should people decide to quit or choose not to renew their contracts.

Customer Retention

Customer retention is another key metric that every field service manager needs at their disposal. We want to get as many new customers in the door and on a contract as possible, but it's just as important to keep the ones you've already got happy because otherwise, they'll be moving onto your competitors pretty quickly if they're not completely satisfied with your service levels.

We’re basically saying that for every month that passes without at least one invoice generated by an existing customer, you’re doing something wrong. There may be a problem with the price or quality of services offered, and until it’s solved, more people are going to go elsewhere leaving you trying to explain why customers seem unhappy.

But the main reason why the customer retention metric is so important is that it gives you an idea of whether there's a major problem that needs fixing quickly before more customers leave. For example, maybe there was an annual service contract renewal due but the customer hasn't contacted you yet over it. They've got another month to go before their current one expires but still they haven’t picked up the phone or sent in a ticket through their online system. So maybe they're not happy with something and have either cancelled or are thinking of cancelling their next year contract etc.

Service To Cash

The Service-to-Cash rate is all about how fast your team can take care of things and get paid for them too. If we’re running a field sales business where our technicians do a lot of on-site setups work that is then billed against monthly, hourly or a by the job rate, then we would need to know how this ratio is playing out for our organisation, so that we can make sure the field sales team is working as hard as they can in reaching their targets.

Examples include custom PC builds, which take time and effort to build to customer specifications just so you know. Not only does it take extra time to do as opposed to say buying off the shelf type components but each one has its own unique set of requirements too such as adding specific sound cards, graphics cards, power supplies etc so even if you've got an assembly line style tech crew maintaining two machines at once (one running while the other one is being built.

So, How Can Fieldproxy Help?

A field sales tracking software that fulfils all these needs and more is Fieldproxy - a one-stop solution to all your field service management needs. With Fieldproxy, you can easily

• Create unique dashboards
• Identify areas of improvement
• Track systems with greater efficiency
• Create and manage client requirements seamlessly.

And that's not all. With Fieldproxy, you can do so much more. Book a Fieldproxy free demo and improve your field sales teams with just a few clicks today.

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