How to Enhance the Field Sales Team’s Performance? The Secret is Out!

Revealing the game-changing secrets of how to enhance field sales processes and significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales team. 

Pawan Kumar’s daily job involves managing 50+ field sales staff. However, he often finds it difficult to execute the operations. The sales head Pawan strives hard to run processes but fails to do so. Upon being asked, what challenges he has been facing, he affirms that: 

• • He lacks visibility into the sales rep’s activities and task status.
  • He spends a significant portion of his time in manual data entry, depriving him of the ability to build sales-driven strategies.
  • He is not properly briefed about the lead’s status due to a communication gap. 

1 in 3 field sales managers like Pawan Kumar have faced these bottlenecks. The best part? It is easier to eliminate the above-mentioned problems via the field service management software and the 8 strategies described below.

8 Remarkable Ways to Improve Field Sales Team Performance

No matter what makes managing a sales team so difficult, you can easily weather the storm with these 8 effective strategies. 

#Strategy 1: Set Measurable Sales Goals

While setting your goals, ensure that it is SMART, i.e., specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. These goals should be aligned well with your business objectives and specific sales executive’s expertise. 

Here is how to make SMART goals in favor of your sales team’s efficiency: 

• Specific: Have a well-written sales goal that should clearly outline the intended outcome. The goal should not leave any confusion and provide a clear picture to all team members of what they’ll be working on. 
• Measurable: Use specific metrics like the number of sales visits done or orders taken to measure and track the goal’s progress. Ensure the metrics you are setting are quantifiable, like a 10% boost in the sales order, calculated by the ratio of orders taken to total orders requests.
• Achievable: Goals are only motivational when they are achievable. So, try to set goals that are not overly challenging or stressful to be met.
• Realistic: Confirm that an individual’s sales goals align with your organizational goals. For instance, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction scores by 15% in the next six months. Then, you must ensure that each employee performs their best by having relevant training and tools.
• Time-bound: Your sales goal must have a realistic time frame. It provides team members with a sense of urgency in completing the task within the fixed deadline.

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#Strategy 2: Distribute, Track, and Measure Sales Tasks Accurately

Do you know that 77% of sales representatives struggle to complete allocated tasks? Because most of them are still equipped with outdated or no sales order management tools. They use the most old-fashioned tactics in handling sales tasks, leading to resource wastage and unfinished projects. 

However, when you use a task management system, you can make gray work fade away by: 

• Easily distributing tasks to sales representatives, following their skillsets, designation, availability, location, etc. 
• Keeping tabs on the progress of every task, at every state, for every deliverable.
• Measuring sales tasks as completed, in progress, or unfinished with the target vs. achievement reports. 
• Freeing up time for your sales staff and manager that would have otherwise been spent navigating clunky systems. 
• Assessing real-time information on potential delays to reallocate resources accordingly before the project delivery gets impacted. 
• Matching the right employees with the right shifts to streamline optimized shift schedules and better workforce efficiency. 

It’s time for a fact-check✅ According to a 2023 QuickBase report, 50% of survey respondents spend 10 hours per week on non-value-added and administrative tasks like data entry. A recent statistic claimed that effective scheduling methods can mitigate the time allocated to schedule creation from 6.61% to as little as 0.63% of the total week.  Tap the link below to learn more! 9 Tips to Optimize Field Service Scheduling – Easily Adjust Schedules

#Strategy 3: Make Time for Field Sales Training Programs

Trained reps can prevent any project from spiraling out of control. And they can improve your field sales performance by an average of 20%.

But how will you train your field sales executives? Don’t worry! Here is what all core components your field sales training program needs to include. 

🔍Product Knowledge: 

First of all, provide your sales reps with a solid understanding of the product they sell like: 

• How does it work?
• What makes it unique?
• What offerings does it have?

Getting these answers will generate a deeper level of confidence among field sales executives. Thereupon, they’ll be able to engage potential clients and close more deals. 

🔍Time Management and Scheduling

What makes top sellers special from others? A lot of things, actually. But, time management and scheduling top the list. Your field sales team can easily manage their bandwidth after learning to schedule their days effectively. However, instead of making them adopt manual methods, equip them with a mobile app, wherein, they can have job schedules for the day. And get their shifts swapped with other executives in moments of emergency. This way, they will save their time and become more productive. 

🔍Technology and Tools

Not just field service scheduling software but you can also use other tools and technologies like order management software. The software lets your executives digitally take sales orders and record clients’ crucial information with custom forms and fields. This allows executives to take orders on-the-go and provides managers with real-time order visibility, streamlining faster order processing like never before. 

🔍Handling Objections and Rejections

Rejections and objections are part of the field sales activity. However, you must ensure that your field sales team can handle it positively. For instance, when your executive faces rejection while selling your products or services, ensure that they do not internalize it, but learn from it. Plus, train them to address objections related to various aspects like trust, timing, price, competition, or product fit effectively. This approach demonstrates empathy and increases the likelihood of a positive outcome. 

#Strategy 4: Automate Incentive Calculation & Processing

Sales incentives motivate your reps to reach, exceed, or crush their sales goals. So, take this as an opportunity and provide your executives with appealing incentives on time. Even Deloitte mentioned that 44% of employees will remain at their jobs when they are awarded financial incentives. 

But, don’t you think that manual incentive calculation can be time-consuming and error-prone? Thus, frustrating your reps when they don’t receive the right sales incentives. Don’t worry! You can try our market’s offered incentive calculation tools. With use of such tools, you will be able to auto-calculate accurate incentive amounts and disburse them in a timely manner. 

Besides this tool, you need a payroll management software that speeds up the salary calculation and disbursement process so your staff feels extra motivated to work. 

With TrackoField’s payroll management software, you can enjoy auto-compilation of salary data based on employees’ working hours, overtime, PTOs, days off, incentives, and bonuses. Best part? The software will sync effortlessly with any internal CRM or accounting system.

#Strategy 5: Foster Collaboration & Communication

This new era of dynamic work depends upon cross-functional collaboration to achieve a common objective. However, most companies become incapable of reaching their goal due to a siloed workplace. The information or updates the sales executives need gets lost in a sea of disconnected channels. Thus, leading to uncompleted deadlines and an increased number of bottlenecks. 

That makes collaboration & communication a lot more important than ever. With the best field sales management tools, teams can come together on a common platform to solve problems, share updates, and generate ideas. Additional features like e-signatures, POD, in-app chat with voice note sharing, and document management support ensure quick collaboration to keep sales tasks moving. Plus, with each field sales executive bringing their unique expertise and experiences, you will definitely get a boost in sales performance. 

#Strategy 6: Get Organized with Digital Documents

The sales team repeatedly juggles various tasks, from lead generation to order creation and contract management. Amidst all these, one aspect that often gets missed is document storage. Either they will use bigger files to place their important papers or multiple systems for storing their documents digitally. However, in both ways, they find it difficult to recollect the receipt, bill, or important document they need, on time.

It’s one of the primary reasons why various organizations use centralized document storage. With such a centralized storage facility, employees can access important documents anytime through their devices without hunting for papers manually. Plus, they can have their hands on the most updated information. Even, field sales order management software like TrackoField supports digital order receipt and invoice creation, leading to data-driven order monitoring. 

#Strategy 7: Enable Mobile Accessibility

With everything being on-demand, mobile accessibility for the field sales team is here to stay. By using the app, field sales executives can smoothly handle their daily tasks and enhance processes like pros. Other than capturing e-signatures, printing receipts, and providing PODs, reps with field sales mobile apps can:

• Arm themselves with remote attendance marking by clocking in for the day or clicking a snap with latitude and longitude, dates to confirm their attendance and availability at the task location. 
• Generate leave requests with just a few taps on their mobile app screens and get their leave approved remotely. 
• Get their tasks scheduled for the day through a digital checklist with complete details like order type, quantity, client, and location details. 
• Digitally take sales orders by adding client’s details and order preferences after reaching the assigned locations.
• Upload invoices as proof of the expenses incurred by them during their working hours in JPEG, PNG, or PDF formats. 
• Access their payslips anytime anywhere and check the payroll calculations based on their actual working hours, leaves taken, incentives earned, and other overheads. 
• Get notifications for last-minute jobs, orders, leads, etc., on their mobile apps right after the managers have updated their employee’s schedules. 
• Use the scanner support to extract the order/product-related information and streamline the POD process with just a few clicks. 
• Self-allocate tasks as authorized by managers when they are overburdened with administrative work. 

#Strategy 8: Monitor Field Sales Rep Performance

Having a clear understanding of your sales metrics is also essential to improve and monitor your field sales team’s performance. Without analyzing these metrics or key performance indicators, you may not acknowledge the challenging and weak areas for further improvement and decision-making. 

So, you should be paying attention to these metrics for analyzing the performance of field sales team:

🔍Individual Sales Number

After assessing individual sales numbers, you can acknowledge the most hardworking field sales executive. For instance, the person with the highest sales number is definitely the one who is utilizing their full potential to ensure the organization’s goal.

🔍Increase in New Contracts

How many new leads you have received to date is another important metric that you should consider. With increased new contracts, you can ensure that your reps are proactively conducting their job roles. 

🔍Customer Acquisition

This helps in assessing the total expenses incurred to acquire a new customer. You can analyze it to determine the efficiency of the acquisition process. 

🔍Conversion Rate

The conversion rate provides the percentages of customers who have finished a desired action. It is calculated into a percentage by having the total number of converted customers and dividing it by the overall size of customers. 

🔍Goal vs. Result 

It determines the result achieved against the goal set by the field sales managers. Tracking sales performance gets easier with this metric. 

Other metrics to look for! Read More: Must-have Metrics and KPIs on Field Service Dashboard – Enabling Faster Decision Making

In a Nutshell!

Challenges like inefficient task planning, communication gaps, and lack of live workforce monitoring make sales processes tough to handle. That’s why we have shared the above strategies so you can improve sales teams’ performance and focus on retaining the client base and earning more revenue. To implement and seek value from the above strategies, it’s best if you go for an automation-driven sales force management software like TrackoField. 

TrackoField gives a single view into the progress and status of happening projects in a matter of minutes – not hours or weeks. The software provides real-time notifications for enhanced communication. And if you’re the one whose eyes glaze over numbers and figures, TrackoField will amaze you here as well. With its insightful and data-driven report generation, you can oversee your sales team’s growth, thus ensuring better decision-making. 

Sign up to use TrackoField and clean up all challenges hindering your field sales team’s performance. 

Frequently Asked Questions

• How to improve the performance of the Field Sales Team?

  Here are multiple ways using which you can improve field sales performance such as: Set measurable sales goals. distribute, track, and measure field sales performance accurately Make time for field sales training programs Automate incentive calculation & processing Foster collaboration & communication Get organized with digital documents Enable mobile accessibility Monitor field sales rep performance

• How to monitor field sales team performance?

  Tracking sales performance is vital and here are the metrics using which you can easily monitor your field sales: Individual sales numbers Increase in new contracts Customer acquisition Conversion rate Goal vs. result