What's On This Page?

• Introduction
• What Is Field Sales?
• What Is Sales Force Automation?
• What Does A Sales Force Automation App Do?
• What Are The Features Of Sales Automation Software?
• How Fieldproxy Can Help Sales Force Automation For Your Business
• Closing Thoughts

Introduction

Field sales tracking is a very important part of sales, no matter which way you look at it. If you’re someone who’s new to the world of sales, you most definitely would not have heard about the enormous world of field sales, and the importance of salesman tracking systems. And if that’s the case, do not worry.

In this article, we’re going to go through everything you need to know about salesman tracking apps as a member of the field sales community, learn what works and what doesn’t, what sales tracking software to use, how employee tracking for field teams really works, and how you can make the most of these sales tracking systems.

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What Is Field Sales?

Until pretty recently, field sales meant going to the market and finding prospects, following up and closing deals. Over time the sales process has become more complex and needed a team to work inside offices and collect leads and make first contact.

With more people purchasing online, many companies have moved to sell from their offices - but it's important not to overlook the importance of outside sales and field sales for companies with relatively complex or high-priced products due to the face to face relationships that need to be established in order for them to succeed.

Even if your company doesn't fall into either of those categories, you'll still want to be prepared with a strategy in place because focusing on accuracy and meeting targets is important when developing a solid reputation within any industry you might happen to be working in. This is why fieldwork is important.

Field sales are important for expanding one's network, getting to the 'grassroots' level of business, earning trust from customers or clients, and persuading them to purchase goods or services. Because field sales reps face the 'real world' out in the field, they are often able to build stronger relationships with their customers than inside sales reps.

What Is Sales Force Automation?

Sales Force Automation helps organizations install scalable solutions to support revenue growth and enhance customer satisfaction with pre-built business applications designed to automate sales processes, accelerate delivery of information and improve territory management.

These apps are designed for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors to mount their business on the mobile devices of their staff to assist with organizing and streamlining sales activities. The technology is also useful as a software tool to facilitate smoother communication between field staff, head office and customers by rapidly sharing essential data across all levels of the business organization.

What Does A Sales Force Automation App Do?

Like we mentioned, sales force automation apps help automate your entire sales process, helping build better sales outreach methods, faster executions, and a more productive workforce. They do this using one of more practices, usually containing a mix of several different features, all to help solve your sales tracking needs.

Any sales force automation app worth its salt should provide functionality for the following aspects of field sales.

Ordering

This is a given, but all sales order tracking systems need to enable their field agents to be able to receive and place orders on behalf of their customers. Field sales agents go about their day making several sales calls and pitches and they need to be able to record these sales somewhere, and be able to report them in real-time to their managers. That is how you make fieldwork efficient.

Clunky manual order management processes slow down your sales team. Get an automated sales tracking solution of your sales employees’ time by eliminating the process of taking orders manually, increase recurring revenue and watch your business grow faster.

Customer Insights

On the topic of customer sales recording, you need to also be able to display customer information to your field sales reps so they know exactly who they’re talking to and can modify their sales pitches accordingly.

Businesses like Fieldproxy have made it easier for customers by implementing an all-in-one solution for businesses in their respective industries. Manage your customers better, know who your top visitors or clients are and which ones need to be addressed first. Geo-tag your customers directly through the app by integrating location data into your customer analytics information.

Visit Plans

Field sales tracking solutions also need to provide, or support, route optimization for agents and maintain the product’s stability while doing so. They should be able to help managers track their outside sales reps as effectively as possible.

With a sales tracking and automation app, you'll always keep track of the location of your employees during customer visits at your fingertips. You'll get to know where the outlets/customers visited on a particular day in real-time along with information such as time spent with each customer.

Beat Plan

Enabling sales reps to make route plans and plan their visits to specific outlets on predefined dates is a great way of enabling them to measure whether their activity has been effective or not. Keeping an instant track on the number of visits done and if they were effective is another one such tweak you can make. Field service management solutions like Fieldproxy work as great beat plan software that are tailored to meet your needs.

Attendance Monitoring

Attendance monitoring for field teams is a crucial aspect of employee payroll in any company. We’ve seen this in almost every organization we have worked with.

Save administrative time and effort by automatically generating attendance reports of your employees in the field, allowing you to keep track of their working hours.

Activity Logging For Field Teams

Sales managers need to know where their field teams are operating and how they are doing at all times. This helps in making better decisions, being informed about anything and everything, and gives clarity to the whole data collection process. If you want to go one step ahead and ensure more clarity in your sales operations, get an activity logger integrated with your field sales tracking solutions. It’s easy to use, and helps keep all your field agents informed on the activities of each member.

Note: Fieldproxy makes it easy for managers to assign tasks and targets to sales reps with just a few simple clicks of the mouse. Using Fieldproxy, your sales reps will never have an excuse not to get work done again because all of the customer details, assigned tasks and target dates are easily accessible from any touchscreen device.

Improve Field Sales Productivity

It is your job as a field manager to make sure that your field teams are working to their full potential. There may be several reasons why they don't and this does result in a number of problems for the business, but there are certain spaces that you can identify and work on to reduce the error rate, increase efficiency in your field teams, and also make your field teams’ jobs easier.

And those are just some of the many many functions of a sales automation software that you need to keep an eye out for when purchasing such a solution for your business.

What Are The Features Of Sales Automation Software?

Apart from the functionalities that we discussed above, there are certain features that every automated sales tracking solution would have. Don’t settle for a software that doesn’t provide these solutions.

Expense Reporting

Expense management is not just entering numbers into a spreadsheet and maintaining that sheet until the end of time. There’s a severe problem with that approach, in case you haven’t figured it out yet. Expense management and reporting needs to be automated to minimize errors, keep ahead of budgeting limits, and get managing finances out of the way of the sales process, so sales teams can focus on getting more sales in.

Customer Relationship Management

Organizing customer details can be difficult if you don't make it easy for the sales team to get their information. Sales representatives should have access to the most recent contact information at any time so that they can quickly follow up with clients who are interested in learning more about your services and products.

Product Management

Sales Managers should utilize sales automation software to help them manage their products. Sales automation tools provide sales reps with information instantly and allows them to focus on cold prospecting rather than time consuming data entry. Alternatively, field agents can also use the product management features of a sales force automation software to keep track of inventory, warehouse management, and even for merchandising.

Stock Tracking

Like we mentioned above, merchandising and inventory management software are really useful tools for field agents and field managers alike. Keeping track of your inventory can be a challenge. To help you know what your team needs to order more of, there are inventory management systems that allow you to track and organize all these products digitally.

Announcements

When you’ve got a big team, any changes or plans that you propose need to be communicated to the whole team clearly, and fast. What better way to achieve this sending out a single broadcast to the people concerned on the platform the team uses the most? I.e: a sales tracking solution that they use everyday!

Tour Plans

A tour planner does exactly what it advertises - it allows field representatives to provide information about their journey plans and get prior approval before they go ahead with their plans. They include details such as daily schedules, planned expenditures and the estimated time of completion for the listed destinations on a trip.

Distribution Management

It's time for you to figure out how you're going to work your primary channel and second channel sales. With a distribution management system in place, managers can stay on top of everything going on with their retailers and partners with everything available in one convenient place, such as their contact information, location details, product orders, collections and visit notes, and add images or files related to any single partner. In fact, you can make all this direct info accessible to sales reps right from the field.

Daily Work Logs

Keep a close eye on your field reps regarding all the activities they do each day by checking their logs on a digital, secure platform. That’s how you make sure your field work gets done on time and in the most efficient way possible.

File Sharing With Field Teams

Gone are the days where you just text your field agents on iMessages, then share some file on Google Drive, and then catch up with the progress on that file on WhatsApp. Have everything in one place - that will save you a lot of time and needless hassle.

Provide salespeople with the documents you want them to have and allow for on-the-go access to crucial information. You can do this all using Fieldproxy, and the best part is it’s FREE!!!

Field Sales Team Performance

It is crucial that your salespeople achieve their target or exceed them at every growth level. Quickly see who is knocking the ball out of the park and find out what strategies lead to increased revenues. Assign targets to field sales reps, keep track of them and evaluate their productivity by comparing actual/planned value.

Field Force Management

Services like Fieldproxy help managers get their field force automated and ready to go in as little as just a few minutes. And at the price they offer, you’re surely getting a bargain, because field force management for sales automation and tracking is a highly demanding and important task.

Payment Collection Management

Collecting payments is one of the biggest requests for any business that has a field team. And it makes sense - the faster you get money in your bank account the faster you’ll be able to complete your transactions. So enabling field teams with these payment integrations is a really useful way to get field agents to close transactions faster.

Mark Attendance And Leaves

Track your outside field sales employees’ time, attendance and leaves with the help of a sales force automation app. For example, Fieldproxy can monitor your employees' leave accounts for you and ensure that your team is being paid for everything they are entitled to like sick days or vacation days.

How Fieldproxy Can Help Sales Force Automation For Your Business

Fieldproxy is an all in one field sales force automation and management software to handle your entire field operations. It is a full-featured software product that helps managers of retail, pharma, consumer goods, real estate and construction etc., to collect data in a structured format.

Managers can create workflows for their employees from the web dashboard and assign tasks for their agents within minutes.

It has a user-friendly mobile app from which the field agents can update the tasks once they complete and managers can get field updates in real-time.

Modules

Fieldproxy has workflows specially designed to ensure that the on-ground field agents are safe and secure. In this time of the pandemic, this special feature acts as a lifesaver by tracing the contact, hygiene compliance and accountability.

"Fieldproxy gives us more visibility of how our business is moving and make us much more efficient each day"

Source: Chantelle, Field Service Manager

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This feature-rich cloud-based application brings all your field tasks under one roof with the most interactive web application and highly capable mobile app. The heavy-duty software provides ample features like:

Attendance Management

Field agents can mark their attendance along with their photo and location remotely from anywhere, from the comfort of their mobile app.

Scheduling And Dispatch

Flexible scheduling allows managers to schedule the jobs for their agents weeks ahead to get them to the right place at the right time.

Mobile App

Fieldproxy mobile app is designed to perform the day to day operations effortlessly

Invoicing and Follow-ups

You can use the prebuilt templates to generate an invoice with just a tap. The generated invoice can be easily downloaded and shared with anyone.

Order Booking

The software has a portal, from which you can place orders conveniently without making frequent calls to the suppliers

Inventory Management

Inventory management acts as a platform to monitor and organize all your Inventory from a single pane

Attractive Dashboard

Managers can filter the agent metrics according to their needs and can easily view the performance in a dashboard.

Report Generation

Tedious reports are automatically generated and the system automatically sends you via Whatsapp or mail.

Geotagging

Locations are geotagged with GPS coordinates for accurate monitoring of on-field agents.

Route Optimization

With this feature, managers can navigate their field service agents with efficiently planned routes to beat the traffic.

Integrated CRM

Maintain long term customer relationships with Fieldproxy's friendliest CRM to conduct meetings and to always stay connected with the customers.

Feedback Collection

To increase customer retention, the mobile app allows the service agents to collect the service feedback from clients and automatically gets saved in the customer feedback portal.

Technician Info Sharing With Customer

You can further pamper your customers, as the software automatically sends the service details like time, technician location to the customers beforehand of the service.

Automated Email & SMS

Service agents will be automatically reminded of their jobs on the previous day Itself. Besides that, this feature comes in very handy for managing inventory, as the tool automatically reminds you to make a purchase when the product falls below the threshold.

Expense Tracker

This feature helps you to save ample time. Once the agents update all their expenses from their mobile app, it automatically calculates all the expenses and sends you a report.

Hence, you can always be aware of the expenses without any effort.

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Closing Thoughts

An employee salesforce automation and time tracking software that fulfills all your needs is Fieldproxy - a one-stop solution to all your field service and employee tracking needs. With Fieldproxy, you can easily

• Create unique dashboards
• Identify areas of improvement
• Track resources with greater efficiency
• Create tasks for different employees and manage them seamlessly.
  

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

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