There could be scheduling and reporting challenges in field sales management services. Here is how managers can remove these bottlenecks.
The popular story of the wood cutter and his axe is quite relevant to the business industry as well. Just as the productivity of the woodcutter depends on how effectively he has sharpened his axe, similarly, the success of a sales model depends on how effectively the bottlenecks have been removed.
Field sales management software harnesses the power of automation and makes sales management a lot simplified, organized and effective by removing the bottlenecks. Listed below are some of the common challenges that business stumble upon in regards to field sales:
Reporting:
Reporting is integral to every sales structure. Traditionally, for submitting their sales report, the sales agents either had to travel back to their offices or had to submit it through the mail from their job locations or so. On one hand, traveling back to the office for report submission is time consuming for the sales agents, on the other hand the culture of mail based reporting puts an extra workload on the managers as he has to make the effort of extracting and compiling the reports for the consolidated analysis.
All these complications can be eradicated if an FSM software is considered. The software supports automated features such as remote reporting, custom formats of reporting, automated report compilation, inbuilt analytics for report analysis, and many more features around reporting.
Travel Time Management:
Traveling is a vital part of field sales & services, but managing travelling is also essential as very often too much time gets wasted on travelling, if the wrong route is taken, or the job locations are at far-off places. The field sales management app software helps in travel time management by facilitating effective scheduling. Be it meeting a potential client with a sales proposal or meeting a regular customer for some up-sale or cross sale, using a field sales management software, task-allocation can be automated and be effectively done ensuring aspects such as field agent's availability on a particular time or date, field agent's proximity to a job location, prevention of double booking, etc.
As a result, a job automatically gets assigned to the nearest available sales agent, and it saves his travelling time and thus more sales meetings can be targeted per day. Also, the software supports GPS navigation as a result the shortest & safest route can be mapped and shared with the agents.
Data Management:
The software is a cloud-based platform, wherein all the data related to business, such as, customer details, sales forms, etc. can be stored. It functions as a centralized repository which can be accessed by the sales agents from anywhere at any time.
Sales Agent Productivity & Performance Analysis:
The software is an effective tool for analysing the on-field productivity and performance of sales agents. With the aid of GPS, the software helps in location tracking, and geo attendance along with location validation. Also, the managers from the back office can have constant updates about the work status of the sales agents by using the automate job updates features. Besides, there are provisions for custom sales reports. All these are measurable and accurate ways to monitor the productivity and performance of the sales agents.
Conclusion
Various field job bottlenecks can be managed effectively with the aid of technology such as GPS navigation, push notifications, digital knowledge repository, etc. Although these technologies are available through various individual apps, having them through segregated sources is not of much help. While field sales management software is a comprehensive solution that combines various technologies to build one-stop solutions specifically designed for managing field sales.
About Author: Bhupendra Choudhary holds considerable experience in managing sales leads as the managing Director of FieldCircle - a globally acclaimed construction management software service firm. His experience in a similar role has helped the company earn great success in providing CMMS software services to clients across the globe.
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