What’s Agri-input Field Force Automation Software? Top Features & Benefits

Want more sales? Explore how agri-input field force automation software tracks visits, manages sales & expands networks!

For agri-input businesses, two things are super important:

1. Managing field sales and teams well.
2. And building strong networks of retailers and farmers.

This is where agri-input field force automation software aka FFA helps!

It gives you a clear view of what’s happening in the field—like visits, orders, and demos.

It lets your team’s plan, track, and stay organised. Think of FFA as your personal helper, making your work aligned and impactful.

Let’s discover the ins and outs of field force automation software. Along with its top features that optimise agri-input sellers’ efficiency to add to revenue.

What is Agri-input Field Force Automation Software?

Field force automation software (FFA) is a handy tool for agri-input businesses. It helps manage their sales team better.

– Keeps track of agents visits to farmers/dealers

– Remotely assign and track agri-sales/services

– Track task status with current progress

The software ensures sales teams stay organized, reach the right farmers, and share updates quickly.

It also collects useful information, like which products farmers like the most, helping businesses grow faster and support farmers more effectively.

The need for such automation arises because this industry lacks visibility of field force & strategic tools.

Challenges Agri-input Businesses Can Relate To

Businesses without automated field force management software struggle with:

1. Difficulty tracking sales orders – It’s tough to locate sales agents and their order status without automation.
2. Missed Farmer/dealer meetings: Meetings with dealers/farmers are not reported correctly. There is no visibility on actual meetings or reasons for delayed or cancelled meetings.
3. Slow Updates – Agents share sales & task updates over calls that can be slow or misreported.
4. Unorganized Tasks – Teams get confused about what to prioritise and end up doing less than assigned targets.
5. Unclear Data: It’s hard to assess field staff’s productivity, the actual reason for good/bad business, or the business prospects, for that matter.

Benefits of Field Force Automation Software for Agri-input Sellers

Let’s layer by layer understand how field force automation software makes your process more impactful.

1. It Gets Tasks Done

With FFA, field reps. get their sales targets or meeting details right over the phone. No need to carry memos or write them down somewhere. They will know:

• How many stores/dealers do they have to visit daily
• Upcoming meeting locations with reminders
• Sales targets they have to achieve

Imagine the amount of time your agents will save with this simplified approach.

2. Exchange of Live Updates (Between Agents & Branch Office)

FFA software makes it convenient for sales staff to send live updates about total sales, deliveries, challenges, and customers’ special preferences.

Your team at the branch office knows what’s going on at all times and can make better decisions.

3. Keeps Clients Happy

The software makes it possible for field agents to act on your customers’ needs faster. Suppose, your customer needs more stock of agro-chemical, your agents can simply:

• Take ad-hoc orders on the spot
• Place orders and get them approved

Not only that, they can even apply custom discounts and prices at the moment. Imagine how this will increase the scope of your agents to retain more customers.

4. Better Sales & Outreach

The software helps collect essential data from the field that helps companies understand:

• Which sales territory is more active
• Demand for which agri-input is high
• Customers & clients’ preferences & expectations

All this helps you improve products, inventories, and marketing efforts.

5. Data-Driven Decisions (More Targeted Sales)

The software helps you make data-driven decisions. It lets you review the most active customer territories and focus on serving those heavily. You can geofence sales territories as per high, medium, and low customer bases and route your sales teams’ efforts accordingly. You will simply be focused on targeted selling and saving your resources, efforts, costs & time.

6. Money Gets Saved

With every process turned systematic and automated, there are fewer mistakes and less waste. This means businesses can allocate their field force better.

Utilise them to an optimum level by visiting their current schedule, targets, and capacity. As a result, they end up saving operational costs.

Types of Agri-input Sellers Needing Field Force Automation

The following agri-input businesses cannot bypass field force management software.

1. Fertilizer and Agrochemical Manufacturers

You can leverage this software to track your on-ground sales teams selling chemical products to farmers or retailers.

2. Seed Sellers

If you have a team selling high-quality seeds, you surely want to track their visits and targets to ensure there are more orders. The software helps you have awareness of marketing & sales teams visiting farmers’ land for sample demonstrations or sales pitches. You can monitor those teams and ensure they are visiting more targeted buyers.

3. Pesticide Providers

Super useful in maintaining on-field sales of pesticide products. With the field force automation software, you can track not only sales but also record product usage feedback through custom forms.

4. Agri-Equipment Suppliers

Managing demo schedules and visits for agri-equipment sales is everything. The software helps you track processes and identify ways to grow demand for installations.

5. Irrigation Solution Providers

The field force automation software will make it easy to assign tasks, track progress, and monitor service delivery.

6. Agri-Retail Chains

It lets you track agents’ locations and deliveries and ensures customer satisfaction.

Such automation simplifies field processes with real-time updates, location tracking, and dynamic task planning.

Top Features of Field Force Automation Software — Serving Agro-input Sellers’ Right

Here are exclusive features offered by field force automation software like TrackoField that help agri-input businesses grow:

1. Automated Task Assignment

The software lets you digitally align tasks for your teams all at once. You can lay tasks with full details over a calendar view. Share tasks with the team across fields with quick notifications.

You can simply add tasks in bulk or add whenever an urgent one crops up. Your agents from the fields will only know their sales targets, next meeting, and overall priorities.

2. Live Task Progress Check

Your sales agents’ progress on the task progress, sales orders, finished demos, or sales meetings – all are informed over an analytical dashboard. Moreover, you can know which agents are pursuing which task, and meeting which farmer or dealer. Even their halts and periods of rest will be known to you.

If you want to check past-date activities and routes of your agents, you can clearly do that with our super smart route history playback.

You will have a live view of how targets are progressing. You will have each agent’s data with the number of tasks they are through and remaining with.

3. Geo-fencing for Attendance Tracking

Knowing whether agents arrived at the task site is a concern for most managers. Surely it is for you too.

This software enables a geofence attendance marking feature (aka location-based attendance marking). This means that whenever your agents arrive or leave from the geofenced sites (clients’ locations), you will get quick notifications.

To ensure accurate attendance, you can sync your agents’ attendance with geofences. That means, for agents to mark their attendance, they have to first visit the first geofence.

Also, the system lets your employee upload a selfie featuring all locational coordinates and timestamps. Very helpful in testifying your agent’s presence at the task site.

💡Fun Part When you choose TrackoField, you can color-code geofences and set them with custom names. Just drag and drop and create from 10 to 100+ geofences.

4. Performance Monitoring

Isn’t it great if you could track your agents’ productivity?

The field force automation software makes it possible by equipping it with dynamic data-led reports. With TrackoField, you get reports drawing your teams’ performance reality. You get almost 50+ reports, including:

• Target vs. achievement reports
• Activity timeline reports
• Task, attendance, and leave reports
• Actual working hours vs. on-duty working hours
• Route distance travelled reports
• And lots more…

5. Efficient Expense Management

The software lets you simplify on-field expense reporting for reimbursements. Your agri-input sales reps can upload expense details with receipts directly on the app, ensuring transparency.

Your team on the other hand can review and approve claims in real-time, reducing processing delays. This simplifies financial management while maintaining accurate records for audits.

What’s More?

• It archives important documents. Your field force can use it to send critical docs, photos, and receipts for efficient workflow and bookkeeping.
• The field force automation software comes with dozens of alerts to notify about missed tasks or new sales orders.
• Agents get options to create custom forms to record visits and note down important data or information. No more need to carry paper piles.

These features make work easier, faster, and more organized, helping businesses stay efficient.

Conclusion

The agri-input field force automation software is like an additional help for agro-input manufacturers. It makes sure that field jobs are made easy and fast. It helps businesses look into the gaps, ensure timely vendor/client meets, and manage sales orders (even if they grow in volume).

In short, the software is a great way to ensure sales agents (field forces) are always on top of their game, whether it’s selling seeds, delivering fertilizers, or keeping track of products. Pretty cool, right?

FAQs on Agri-input Field Force Automation Software

• What field activities can field force automation track?

  The software tracks and reports about field force’s:
  - Sales visits
  - Order placements’
  - Field demos and trials
  - Task completions with timeline
  - Live location and on-duty hours

• Does the software support field agents’ real-time location tracking?

  Yes, it provides GPS-enabled real-time location tracking. But the purpose is not to spy or micromanage, it’s to ensure efficiency and timely deliverables from their field forces.

• How does field force automation improve field agents' productivity?

  The software helps replace the manual task allocation method. It helps allocate location-verified tasks. Plus, it provides visibility on every field visit/activity of their field forces. All while ensuring agents are focused on high-priority tasks and aren’t unnecessarily idling.

• Can the software integrate with our existing ERP or CRM systems?

  Yes, TrackoField seamlessly integrates with ERP, CRM, and other 200+ business tools you rely on. We ensure the data flow is seamless and less time-consuming through robust API integrations.