McKinsey’s 2021 global survey of 2500 B2B companies reveals that only those that leverage next-gen tech and transform their sales model place themselves in a position to grow their revenue at “twice the rate of GDP.”
Channel sales strategies are not the same as they were a few years ago. With uncertainty surrounding us, the sales teams and strategy need to stay agile and build efficient operations. And what does building channel sales efficiency mean in 2022? In concrete terms, it points to higher sales returns, better prospecting, lesser running around, optimized distributor management, etc.
To that end, this article explores the challenges facing field sales operations and how great mobile apps could help overcome them.
What the Current State of a Channel Field Sales Executive Looks Like
Today’s channel management executives must be more proactive in communicating and managing partner and customer visits. Also, they need to be flexible enough to handle the many challenges materialising in day-to-day sales.
The pandemic has caused many companies to avoid in-person contact. But unfortunately, most of the field sales reps are still tied up with age-old sales strategies that are incredibly time-consuming or require a ton of manual effort. And since most field sales reps work on long-term contracts, their processes need to rely on relationship-building with their partners and customers before qualifying them.
But do they match up to the expectations? Not always, due to a lack of a practical approach to managing their day-to-day operations. In the same vein, here are five major challenges the sales team might face if not yet upgraded to the right tools in the evolving technology landscape.
5 Challenges Currently Facing the Field Sales Team
1. Inaccurate Territory and Route Planning
Manually looking up routes to reach destinations and the associated miscalculations waste a ton of the team’s time. And if new additions occur, the sales rep alone would be unable to fit them into their schedule.
What businesses need is a tool that can optimise their route planning process. It can help plan the team’s schedule in advance and auto-assign routes using the existing data, resulting in accelerated lead generation.
Having an effective territory management plan can avoid territory overlap amongst two or more field sales reps while also helping in saving their precious time and gas money.
2. Lack of Sales Transparency
Often in field sales, businesses fail to track their activity performance since the job is not constrained to work from an office. This is when an activity-tracking feature in your mobile solution can guarantee employee and operational transparency.
One of the major problems facing sales businesses is a lack of transparency, resulting in losing out on bigger opportunities with the customers and substantial monetary losses in the long run.
As a result, it’s feasible for the executives to use a feature-rich mobile application to check in and out of work and track daily activities. Businesses can use the mobile app features to geo-track their reps.
3. Decreasing Productivity
An obvious challenge in field sales is the decreased productivity at work.
What does productivity mean from a sales perspective? In simple words, it’s the ability of the field sales executive to finish their assigned tasks within the set timeframe.
Owing to all the manual tasks at hand like route planning, manual scheduling of customers, order capturing, monitoring, and more, their productivity is bound to slump.
Automation has taken over almost every domain, including sales as well. Businesses can invest in robust, easy-to-use software and mobile app to automate their sales’ business tasks. This will, in turn, help with greater engagement within the team, leading to the business’s overall productivity.
4. Issues with Sales Prospecting
Prospecting is the most critical segment of the entire sales cycle. But do your sales reps have sufficient time on their hands to prioritise this? The constant collection of customer details, updating records, and manual tracking of sales-related activities increase the risk of manual errors.
So as a solution to this, businesses must invest in tools that put their tasks on autopilot and automatically fetch critical customer data for better tracking. This way, their executives can concentrate on the most crucial task: prospecting and generating high-quality leads.
5. Ineffective Performance and Activity Tracking
A lack of accurate sales reports is also a concern as companies could quickly lose track of activities. To that end, a decent sales activity tracker should be capable of tracking every connection the executive makes with a prospect or customer.
Tracking is essential as it indicates whether or not the sales executives are performing critical tasks that add value to the business. With thorough tracking, calculation of profits or revenue becomes a breeze.
A Mobile Solution for Your Field Sales Team
It’s high time your sales executives focused on more critical tasks than spending hours planning routes or manually documenting sales. And this is made possible thanks to the ever-growing adoption of mobile apps.
Mobile capabilities have continuously grown with no end in sight. And with the usage of mobile-driven sales strategies and automation, businesses can pivot their sales in the right direction.
Here’s summing up the mobile advantage you’d have over your legacy infrastructure for effective field sales:
- Inbuilt geo-tracking to track the team’s activities and performance.
- Effective route planning – leading to more employee productivity.
- Automation of routine and manual tasks.
- Efficient pre-planning of all field activities.
- Better data management by connecting to backend data.
- Rapid communication within the team and between prospects.
Therefore, it’s safe to say that taking the mobile route is a fool-proof and profitable way to optimise sales and stand strong against the market competition.
Amshuhu offers a perfect solution to your outdated sales processes with its feature-rich mobile application solution.
Drop us a message today to re-strategize your sales channels.
