How Multi-Outlet Car Dealerships Are Managing Field Sales with Field Force Automation

Manage your car sales reps with zero manual intervention using field force automation. Eliminate delays, test drive no-shows and time-taking paperwork.

Field sales reps serve as primary point of contact between a car dealership and customers. They help customers select a vehicle, conduct test drives, negotiate prices, handle documentation, etc.

All these tasks require timely visits and efficient customer interactions. Any missed appointment or test-drive no shows can result in a lost sale.

But car dealerships often have multiple outlets and several sales reps on its payroll. Managing them can be challenging, especially with manual methods like phone calls, WhatsApp or paper forms.

Let’s learn dealerships can avoid manual intervention and use field force automation to effectively manage your car sales reps.

What Makes Field Sales Challenging for Multi-Outlet Car Dealerships?

Before you read further, first know what major challenges in field sales app for car dealerships face while managing their field reps.

1. Real-Time Visibility Gaps

Without visibility of your car sales reps, managers won’t know where reps are during work hours. Whether they are attending test drives or stuck in traffic? Lack of live visibility makes it hard to measure productivity or intervene if a lead is going cold.

No real-time verification of data on total visits and test drives conducted also leads to blunders. Reps can submit wrong data or misreport their performance just to close their targets.

2. Coordination With Spread Out Sales Teams

Car dealerships often have multiple showrooms, yards, and service points spread across cities or regions, along with large field sales teams. Coordinating with them can be a hassle, especially since they travel between locations – showrooms, lots and customer sites.

Managers face issues like contacting reps in remote areas with zero networks or tracking maintaining a log of their offline activities. This affects ad-hoc task allocation and informed decision making.

3. Poor Prospecting & Customer Management

There is high competition in the car sales market and dealerships need to convert leads and onboard customer quickly. You cannot sit idle, or leads will go cold. But it happens far too frequently.

The reason?

• Sales rep cannot track and categorise leads.
• Poor communication with customers and delayed follow-ups.

4. Manual Data Collection

Daily Sales Reports (DSRs) are often submitted manually or through inconsistent formats (photos of handwritten sheets, WhatsApp messages).

Data can be fragmented, delayed, or sometimes lost, especially when agents forget to log details in real-time. This makes it challenging to consolidate and analyze sales data for strategizing.

Read Blog: What is Field Force Automation Software – Benefits, Features & Future Trends

How Multi-Outlet Car Dealerships Are Managing Field Sales with Field Force Automation

Here is how multi-outlet car dealerships are using field force automation software to eliminate manual intervention. We’ve listed 7 ways the software can help streamline field sales operations.

1. Live Tracking of Field Activities

With field force automation, managers can see where their sales reps are in real-time and what they’re doing. So, say goodbye to calling and texting to get work updates.

Here’s what dealerships can do with live location and activity tracking.

• Verify that agents visited the right customer.
• Track car sales reps even when they are offline.
• Monitor movement live across various zones.
• Check activity status of car salesmen – available, absent, break.
• Check work or visits status – pending, completed, rescheduled, cancelled.
• View the battery and network status of agents in real time.

2. Automated Daily Beat Planning

Time is of the essence for any sales agent. Faster visits result in better customer engagements. But to ensure sales reps reach customers on time, it’s necessary to optimise their travel routes.

Field force automation software can do that. It allows managers to:

• Assign routes after considering region, road conditions, traffic, task priority, staff expertise, etc.
• Send alerts to reps about road conditions, missed visits or delays.
• Review trip playback history to analyse reps’ travel patterns.
• Club multiple visits on the same route to save time.
• Choose the most optimum route – shortest and fastest.

3. Geo-Verified Attendance & Activity Tracking

Paper punch cards and in-office attendance are not feasible when managing remote sales teams. But thanks to sales automation tools, field reps can:

• Mark attendance from anywhere using their mobile phone.
• Log face-ID/ selfie-verified attendance with location and time stamps.

The geofencing technology ensures sales reps can only clock in when they are at the designated task site. Every entry and exit from the geofence is also recorded. This maintains transparency, prevents buddy punching and eliminates work hours inflations.

Read Blog: Geofencing Attendance System: Benefits and Tracking Features

4. Seamless Customer Onboarding

Field force automation software simplifies the customer onboarding process. It allows reps to quickly collect orders, capture customer data via order forms and offer personalised prices or discounts.

Field reps can also onboard customers in bulk using shareable digital forms. In addition, these forms and audio attachments can be used to record customers’ feedback, pain points and test drive details.

The customer data is automatically processed into excel sheets for the managers.

5. Smart Task or Visits Allocation

Instead of manually managing sales visits via spreadsheets, managers can use the field force automation software to:

• Consider allocating tasks after checking employees’ availability, expertise and location.
• Assign tasks based on priority, region, or type (test drive, survey, consultation etc.)
• Add detailed descriptions, images, documents, or audio files for better task understanding of reps.
• Schedule visits on the go in case of emergencies.

This way you can prevent task clashes and missed test drives due to workflow confusion.

6. Automated Expense Tracking

One of the most mismanaged and manually performed field operations is expense reporting. Sales reps incur unavoidable expenses like food, vehicle maintenance, fuel, stationary, lodging, etc.

These have to be timely reimbursed, but managers struggle with inflated expense records, manual approvals and verifying paper receipts.

Field force automation software solves this by:

• Automating the expense reporting. Sales reps can raise expense requests from the field using their phone.
• Letting agents upload timestamped and location tagged digital expense receipts.
• Allowing managers to validate expense claims via route, visit data, and the attached media.
• Offering multi-level approvals to keep the reimbursement process strict and authenticated.

7. Forms and documentation

Car sales require a lot of documentation. But maintaining paper trails can be chaotic and difficult to analyse. Therefore, car dealerships need alternate methods of data collections.

Field force automation software accomplishes this in various ways.

A) Forms:

Sales reps use forms for a variety of reasons like:

• Performing market research
• Gathering feedback
• Conducting pre-sales surveys
• Understanding customers’ preference or pain points

The software also offers customisable forms with custom fields. These forms can be shared using QR codes and URLs for convenience.

B) Attached Media Files:

Field reps can upload images, pictures, audio, and documents using their mobile phones. These media files reduce unnecessary paperwork, maintain a digital document trail and provide proof of work.

C) Digital Signatures:

This is another way of simplifying sales operations. After any successful visit or order placement, reps can easily take signatures from customers using the field force management app itself.

Conclusion

Car dealerships must act quickly on leads and deliver strong customer experiences to close sales. But this is easier said than done.

Multi-outlet car dealerships still using manual FFM methods struggle with scheduling sales visits, managing field employees, ensuring on-time test drives, and more.

That’s where a field force automation tool like TrackoField comes in. It can streamline field operations, improve rep productivity, and eliminate paperwork. The result? More sales, faster customer onboarding and improved customer satisfaction.

Book a free demo to know more about TrackoField.

FAQs

• What challenges do multi-outlet dealerships sales face in managing field reps??

  - Lack of real-time visibility of sales reps across branches
  - Inconsistent reporting and follow-ups
  - Coordination gaps between central office and field reps
  - High chances of data loss or manipulation with manual methods

• What devices do field reps need to use TrackoField?

  Only a smartphone. TrackoField is optimized for low data usage and supports offline logging in patchy areas. It also offers features like attendance, visit tracking, order capture, and expense logging. All these can be accessed from the phone.

• Can dealership owners monitor all their branch activities remotely?

  Yes, they can. Field sales automation software provides real-time dashboards, branch-level reports, live location tracking of field staff, and role-based access.
  This allows owners and managers to monitor KPIs, rep performance, and sales activity across all outlets from anywhere.

• Can TrackoField be integrated with existing dealership management systems?

  Yes. TrackoField offers open APIs and webhooks that allow smooth integration with most DMS, CRM, and ERP platforms.
  This enables automated data syncing, central record-keeping, and fewer manual updates across systems.

• Is manual field reporting still reliable for fast-growing dealership chains?

  No. Manual methods like paper DSRs or WhatsApp updates are slow, error-prone, and lack verification.
  As dealership chains scale, real-time data becomes essential for planning, performance reviews, and reducing revenue leakage.