In today’s competitive business landscape, reaching out to customers in a personalized and engaging manner is crucial for success. Field sales make a significant difference in several industries by allowing businesses to tailor their offerings according to individual needs and providing exceptional customer experiences.
Field Sales professionals are the backbone of industries like Apparel, Consumer Durables, and Consumer Processed Goods (CPG). It takes a complex, well-orchestrated order-to-supply-returns chain to get those chip packets into stores and refresh them. Disconnected tools, manual entries, and updation of order data over calls lead to incorrect order bookings, revenue loss, supply chain issues, and dissatisfaction at all levels in the supply chain.
In this blog post, we will explore the concept of field sales, its impact on various industries, the challenges field sales teams face, and how Vtiger’s Field Sales Add-On revolutionizes the field sales experience.
What are Field Sales?
Field sales is a direct selling approach in which sales representatives or agents physically visit customers to present products or services, answer queries, and close sales deals. This personalized approach allows businesses to build stronger client relationships and adapt their sales pitch based on individual preferences.
Field sales representatives often work outside the traditional office environment, visiting various locations to connect with potential customers. The face-to-face interactions in field sales help build trust and credibility, making it a preferred method in many industries.
Why is Field Sales Critical to Success in Some Industries?
Field sales can transform industries where personalized interactions and relationship-building are critical to closing deals. Here are a few industries where field sales excel:
- B2B Sales: In complex B2B sales, understanding clients’ unique needs and challenges is vital. Field sales allow representatives to engage decision-makers in person, build rapport, and address specific concerns, resulting in higher success rates.
- Healthcare: In the healthcare industry, trust and empathy play a vital role. Field sales representatives can demonstrate medical products or devices, answer medical professionals’ questions, and provide personalized solutions.
- Pharmaceutical: In the pharmaceutical sector, field sales representatives can provide detailed product information to healthcare professionals, address specific medical needs, and gain valuable feedback, fostering trust and credibility.
- Real Estate: Buying a property is a significant decision; clients value face-to-face interactions with real estate agents. Field sales agents can showcase properties, understand buyers’ preferences, and provide valuable insights.
- Manufacturing: Manufacturing companies often deal with complex products and solutions. Field sales agents can explain technical details, conduct product demonstrations, and address customers’ queries directly, fostering strong relationships.
- Packaged Consumer Goods: Field sales are crucial for selling and stocking packaged goods at outlets due to the personalized approach it offers. Field sales representatives can visit retail outlets, assess product placement and visibility, replenish stock, and address concerns. This direct interaction with outlet owners or managers helps ensure optimal product positioning, timely restocking, and the establishment of strong business relationships, resulting in increased sales and brand visibility at the point of purchase.
How Does a CRM Help in Field Sales?
A CRM system is a game-changer for field sales teams. It empowers sales representatives and managers to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Key benefits of using a CRM in field sales include:
- Centralized Data: A CRM gathers all customer-related information in one place, ensuring field sales reps can access accurate data while interacting with clients.
- Real-Time Updates: Sales managers can receive real-time updates on field sales activities, track progress, and offer instant support.
- Automated Reporting: CRM systems automate data entry, generating insightful reports that help analyze sales performance and identify areas for improvement.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Field sales reps can collaborate seamlessly with managers and colleagues through a unified platform.
- Beat Planning: CRMs help sales managers create optimized beat plans and routes, ensuring efficient field operations.
- Data Analysis: Analytical tools in CRM enable managers to gain valuable insights into customer preferences and sales trends, aiding in better decision-making.
How does Vtiger Field Sales Add-On Help Field Sales Teams?
The Vtiger Field Sales Add-On is a powerful extension to the Vtiger One CRM platform, and is specifically designed to cater to the unique needs of field sales teams. It offers a range of features that simplify beat planning, tracking, and reporting, empowering sales representatives and managers alike.
Some key features of the Vtiger Field Sales Add-On include:
- Live Tracking: Real-time location tracking of field sales reps ensures sales managers can monitor their teams and make timely decisions.
- Beat Plan: The Beat Plan feature helps optimize routes by allowing managers to set start and end locations, apply filters, and create fixed or flexible routes.
- Insights: This feature provides comprehensive analytics, including Order Analytics, Visit Analytics, Route Analytics, and Tour Reports, helping sales managers assess sales performance and identify growth opportunities.
- Field Sales Mobile App: Field sales representatives benefit from a dedicated mobile app that facilitates taking orders, tracking payments, logging HQ and distributor visits, conducting audits, and creating surveys.
- Dealer App: The Dealer App allows dealers to create and track quotes, orders, and cases, streamlining communication with sales representatives.
Vtiger Field Sales Add-On gives organizations a huge advantage over tools that are designed only to do beat management or field sales tracking. The add-on natively integrates with the other capabilities offered by Vtiger CRM to deliver a comprehensive tool that solves several challenges. Let us do a deep dive into a few of these.
Here are some additional benefits of using Vtiger One for field sales:
- Increased visibility: Vtiger One provides a single view of all sales data, which helps managers to track performance and identify opportunities.
- Improved efficiency: Vtiger One automates many tasks that field sales reps typically have to do, freeing them up to focus on more important activities.
- Better customer service: Vtiger One makes it easy for field sales reps to communicate with customers and resolve issues, which helps to improve customer satisfaction.
- Increased productivity: Vtiger One helps field sales reps to be more productive by providing them with the tools they need to close deals faster.
- Ready-made solutions: Vtiger One offers a variety of ready-made solutions that you can use to get started quickly.
- Flexible platform: Vtiger One is a flexible platform you can customize to meet your needs.
- Scalable solution: Vtiger One is a scalable solution that can grow with your business.
- Easy to use: Vtiger One is easy to use and navigate, even for users without CRM experience.
Higher Adoption
The new field sales app has an easy-to-use interface tailored specifically for sales reps. This means that reps can quickly and easily find the information they need without spending time navigating through complex menus or entering data.
The app also provides a single view of all the information a rep needs, including leads, opportunities, and customer data. This eliminates the need for reps to manually switch between multiple applications or enter data into different systems.
No Data Entry
The app also automates many tasks that reps typically have to do at the end of the day, such as entering call notes and updating customer records. This frees reps to focus on more important tasks, such as building relationships with customers and prospects.
Communication
The app also allows reps to communicate with dealers across multiple channels, including WhatsApp and phone. This gives reps the flexibility to communicate in the most convenient way for the dealer.
Overall, the new field sales app is designed to be easy to use and to save reps time. This will lead to increased app adoption and improved results for the sales team.
Increased Effectiveness & Efficiency
The new field sales app will help supervisors to be more effective and efficient by making it easy to:
- Set up beats: Supervisors can easily create and manage beats, which are geographic areas that are assigned to field sales reps. This helps to ensure that reps are covering the right territory and not overlapping each other.
- Schedule recurring routes: Supervisors can easily schedule recurring routes for reps, which helps to ensure that reps are visiting their customers regularly.
- Join on a beat: Supervisors can easily join a beat, which allows them to see what reps are doing in the field and to provide support if needed.
- Manage leaves: Supervisors can easily manage leaves, which allows them to ensure that reps are not scheduled to work when they are on leave.
The new field sales app will also help field sales reps to save time by automating many of the tasks that they typically have to do, such as:
- Data entry: The app automatically enters data into the CRM system, which saves reps time and reduces the risk of errors.
- Reporting: The app generates reports that reps can use to track their progress and identify improvement areas.
- Communication: The app allows reps to communicate with each other and with supervisors, which helps to improve collaboration and coordination.
Overall, the new field sales app will help supervisors be more effective and efficient, and help field sales reps save time. This will lead to increased productivity and improved results for the sales team.
Better Data Visibility & Insights to Help Management Take Proactive Actions
Vtiger One offers a variety of features that help management to gain better visibility into their sales data and to take proactive actions. For example, Beat Analytics shows high-performing and poor-performing outlets, which can help management to identify areas where they need to focus their attention.
Vtiger One also offers out-of-the-box insights, such as order analytics and beat analytics. These insights provide management with valuable information that they can use to make informed decisions.
In addition, Vtiger One allows management to create custom reports and to use the Insights Designer to create custom insights. This gives management the flexibility to get the information they need in the way that they need it.
Overall, Vtiger One provides management with the tools they need to gain better visibility into their sales data and to take proactive actions. This can help to improve sales performance and to achieve business goals.
Shorter TTM due to ready capabilities
Vtiger One offers a variety of ready capabilities that can help you to shorten your time to market (TTM). For example, the FSA Add-on and the CPQ Add-on provide you with the basic capabilities to roll out the solution quickly.
In addition, Vtiger One’s VTAP platform makes it easy to develop advanced features. For example, you can use VTAP and APIs to integrate stock with DMS.
Vtiger One also has ready connectors with communication systems (Emails, SMS, Phone), collaboration systems (MS Teams, Google Meet, Zoom), Accounting systems & more. This means you can easily connect Vtiger One with your existing systems and processes.
Overall, Vtiger One offers a variety of features that can help you to shorten your TTM and get your field sales solution up and running quickly.
Customizability
Vtiger One is a highly customizable platform allowing you to tailor the solution to meet your needs. The Admin Console gives you the power to:
- Set up access controls: You can define who has access to what data and what actions they can take.
- Create approval rules: You can define who needs to approve certain actions, such as creating a new lead or closing a deal.
- Set assignment rules: You can define which field sales rep should be assigned to a lead or opportunity based on certain criteria, such as location or industry.
In addition, Vtiger One’s Visual Process Designer allows you to create automation flows for tasks such as reminders, leave approvals, and more. This low-code platform makes it easy to create complex automation flows without writing any code.
Overall, Vtiger One offers a high degree of customizability that allows you to tailor the solution to meet your needs. If you are looking for a field sales solution to help you improve your sales performance, Vtiger One is a great option.
If you want a deeper, more exhaustive dive into Field Sales, please check out our in-depth write-up – Field Sales: The Ultimate Guide.
