What Are the Challenges of Managing a Field Sales Team?

There are many challenges when it comes to managing field sales teams, like lack of visibility and fragmented communication, which can be eliminated by field employee management software.

A lot is riding on field sales reps. They make the sales, meet clients, score leads, and contribute to the company’s revenue and image. Managing them requires additional skill and efficiency. With a field employee management system, you can arm your sales reps and yourself with game-altering solutions.

With a field employee management system, your field sales reps are supercharged with all the necessary tools to acquire new clients, retain old ones and increase their sales. Streamlining their work and boosting their productivity, the system does it all.

Challenges in Managing Field Sales Team

Managing a team of field sales employees is no cheesecake walk. Their management is laden with challenges and tests even the most seasoned sales managers struggle with.

Lack of Real-Time Visibility

Consider this a challenge if you often wonder what your field sales employees are doing at a given time.

Sales managers can monitor their inside sales team through their cabins, but what about field sales employees meeting with clients at 2:00 pm?

This lack of visibility into field reps’ activities and progress is harming the business. Also, sales managers don’t have access to insights into lead progress and customer interaction without a proper system in place. This often leaves the managers feeling blindsided.

Ensuring the Productivity of Field Sales Reps

How do you measure the productivity of your field reps?

Is it by ensuring that the tasks and meetings assigned to them are completed by the end of the day? But that is not a correct method of measuring productivity as many factors are involved. For example, uneven workload, mundane tasks like data entry and assigning more meetings far away from one another affect the productivity of field sales reps.

Many might not pay attention to it, but sales require proper skills and training. And if there is a lack of proper training the reps might struggle to close deals.

Retaining High Performing Reps

Studies show that the average sales rep tenure is 18 months. However, to hit peak performance, sales reps require 3-5 years of experience.

It means that most sales reps never achieve their full potential. To do so, they need to stick around longer. As a sales manager, you must determine a method to reduce the field sales reps’ turnover rate.

Communication Gap

Due to geographical gaps, often a communication gap can bubble up. This will cause delay in information sharing, updates and addressing doubts and concerns. And this will bring difficulty in closing deals and during sales pitches.

Inefficient Task and Route Planning

There are high chances that a sales rep gets stuck in a meeting, and another has to cover for them. Now this is where everything starts going wrong. The other rep does not hold the same rapport and information as the original sales personnel with the clients. This might cause them to reject the deal.

That is why sales managers must schedule meetings with clients in the same vicinity distance.

Sweet Heartening of Products

In the most common scenario, reps might gift products and hampers from the inventory to form good client relations. But they often unofficially give the products or discounts to their friends and family. This is harmful to the business.

How is Field Employee Management System Aiding Field Sales Rep Management?

When faced with a challenge, look for a way, not a way out – David Weatherford.

A field employee management system is a necessity if you want to move out of the cycle of challenges. The system uses automation to streamline tasks and strategies for the next quarters and the future.

Geocoded Attendance and Leave Management

Save time and prevent time theft or buddy punching through geocoded attendance feature of the field employee management system. It marks the presence of the field sales employee monitoring app once they reach their first client site or meeting.

Additionally, it offers visual verification, which leaves no chance for fabrication or error in attendance data.

Order Management

Just imagine your field sales employees are closing deals day in and day out and making humungous sales of products but end up messing up the order/billing part of the process. Now we don’t want that, right?

That is why the field employee management system offers an order management feature. It allows field sales reps to bill orders on the go. Also, the managers can view the orders placed by the employees. Thus helping to maintain complete visibility, transparency of operations, awareness of the productivity and efficiency on the field.

Tracking and Monitoring in Real-time

When choosing field employee management software, it is best to select one that can provide real-time tracking or monitoring features without any downtime. Tracking builds accountability for field actions and effortlessly answers the question of where the field sales employees are in real-time.

Sales Performance Analytics

With autogenerated employee performance reports, managers get a good idea of what their employees are doing in the field. And since these reports contain real-time insights, it’s easy to determine the current productivity of the employees. These reports are customisable to suit the requirement of the sales managers.

Task Assignment

Field employee management systems bring efficiency and ease of working and managing. One of the ways it does so is by offering a bulk task upload option. This allows sales managers to schedule their employee’s meetings and visits well in advance.

This has multiple benefits to it. Firstly, it saves time for both employees and the boss. Secondly, this allows managers to plan all on-site meetings for an employee in one area. This way, reps don’t have to travel far and wide to meet the clients.

Additionally, managers can add, edit or remove tasks remotely. They can even track the assigned tasks’ real-time status or checklist. Two-way task allocation is also possible; sales reps can assign tasks and schedule meetings themselves.

Real Quick Reimbursement Process

It is vital to keep the field sales reps motivated; a quick reimbursement process can be like an incentive. The system allows field reps to upload their claim requests right from the field. Claim requests are visible to immediate seniors in the hierarchy to approve that too remotely.

The best part is that the employees can track the real-time status of the claim in real-time. They don’t have to make rounds to the accounts department anymore.

In Built Chat Box

The system is all about smart and efficient working, so it offers a built-in chat box, thus mitigating the need for multiple platforms to function. On it, the sales employees and managers can communicate, share doubts and queries, and hold meetings. Not only messages but also share voice notes and media.

Alerts and Notification

Who said that only reports and real-time monitoring could help you manage your field employees? Alerts and notifications are also an efficient way of managing your team of field sales employees. Alerts to employees like – upcoming meetings will notify them beforehand, thus ensuring that they are not late for the meeting.

Similarly, managers get notified whenever the employees enter no network zones or have completed their tasks. These notifications and alerts are customisable.

Manage Your Sales Field Employees With TrackoField

Managing field sales employees is no joke. Sales managers have to make sure sales targets are being met, the sales team is productive, and monitor the performance of field reps. They face many unspoken or unhighlighted challenges on the way. But field service management software is here to lighten this burden through automation.

TrackoField is just the perfect field management software offering to maximise field sales reps’ productivity. It has all the right solutions that can be of great help in allowing your agents to close deals faster.

Schedule a demo now!