Short answer Field sales, also called outside sales, is selling face to face at the customer's place of business, rather than by phone, email or online. At a retail brand, field sales reps visit the shops that stock the brand on a regular cycle to take orders, check the shelf and keep each outlet buying.
Field sales is often pictured as a sales representative meeting potential customers and closing one big deal. At a brand that sells through distributors and shops, most of the work is repeat visits to outlets that already stock the brand.
How field sales works at a retail brand
A retail brand rarely sells straight to every shop. It sells to distributors, and each distributor supplies the grocery stores, pharmacies, convenience stores and dealers in its area. The distributor's sales to those shops are the brand's secondary sales. The field team works this shop end of the chain, because that is where a product gets ordered, stocked and seen by shoppers.
The work runs on beats. A beat is the fixed list of outlets one rep covers on a given day, in a set order, repeated every week or two. Our beat planning guide explains how to build them.
Once the rep has the order, it reaches the shop in one of two ways:
- Pre-sell. The rep takes the order today, and the distributor bills and delivers it later, often the next day. The rep carries a phone, not stock.
- Van sales. The rep sells from stock on a van, prints the bill and collects payment at the counter, so the shop gets the goods on the spot. Van sales software runs that whole day from the rep's phone.
Field sales vs inside sales
Inside sales is selling by phone, email, video call or chat, from an office. For a retail brand, the difference that matters most is what the seller can see and fix at the counter.
| Field sales | Inside sales | |
|---|---|---|
| What the seller sees | The shelf, the stock, the price tags and the rival displays | Only what the retailer says |
| What the seller can do | Take the order, fix the display, collect payment, sign up the shop next door | Take the order, answer questions, follow up |
| Cost of each contact | Higher, because of travel and time at each stop | Lower, with more contacts in a day |
| Best for | Outlets where the shelf matters or the relationship needs a face | Repeat orders between visits, and small outlets far apart |
For a retail brand this is seldom an either-or choice. The real question is which outlets need a person at the shelf, and how often. Between visits, BeatRoute's TeleOrder AI Agent calls retailers to take repeat orders in their local language. That leaves the visit for the work a phone call cannot do.
What a field sales rep does at each outlet
A visit to a shop usually covers five jobs, in roughly this order:
- Take the order against the current price list, the running schemes and the stock the shop has left, with a suggestion of what else it should carry.
- Check the shelf. Is every product on the brand's must-sell list there, in its place, at the right price? This is the heart of retail execution.
- Pass on schemes and new products. A discount the retailer has never heard of does nothing for sales.
- Collect payment where the rep handles cash, and log returns of damaged or expired stock.
- Sign up new outlets along the route, which is how a brand widens its reach in an area.
The order is the part everyone counts. The shelf check is what protects next month's order: a product that sits in the storeroom or behind a rival's display does not sell, and a shop that did not sell last month's stock will not reorder it.
Who is in a field sales team
Titles vary, but most teams that sell through distributors have these layers:
- Sales rep, also called a sales executive, salesman or pre-seller. Covers the beats in an assigned territory and builds the relationship with each outlet.
- Distributor salesman. In many markets the salesman who visits the shop is paid by the distributor. The brand still sets the beat, targets and must-sell list, and sees that work through distributor management software.
- Supervisor or sales officer. Rides along on beats and coaches a small group of reps.
- Area sales manager (ASM) and above. Owns a territory's distributors, reps and numbers; regional and national heads set targets and schemes.
How to measure a field sales team
Teams watch five numbers. Each is easy to count and easy to misread on its own.
- Coverage: the share of a rep's assigned outlets visited in the cycle.
- Calls: the visits made in a day.
- Productive calls: visits that ended in an order. Productive calls divided by total calls is the strike rate.
- Lines per call: how many different products the average order carries. It shows whether reps sell the range or only the best seller.
- Order value per call: sales value divided by calls.
Read coverage before productivity
Measure coverage against the outlets each rep is assigned, not against the visits they made. Valvoline Cummins found this in its own team: sales executives were reaching only 25 to 30% of their assigned customers. It moved field sales, routing and reporting onto the BeatRoute platform. Customer connect rose to over 70%, and supervisors could see which outlets were visited and what happened there, as the Valvoline Cummins case study describes.
The two numbers point to different fixes. Low coverage is a beat and route problem: too many outlets on the list, stops in the wrong order, or nobody checking which shops were skipped. A low strike rate with good coverage is a visit problem: reps reach the outlets but see them in the wrong order of priority, or leave without the conversation that gets an order. Read coverage first, because a strike rate that counts only the outlets that were easy to reach flatters the team.
How a field sales app supports the work
Most of these numbers used to come from a notebook and the rep's memory. A field sales app puts the beat, the order form, shelf photos and collections on the rep's phone, with each visit checked in at the outlet, so coverage and strike rate reach the manager as data the same day. Our guide to what a field sales app does covers the features and what to check before you choose one.
BeatRoute's field sales app works on both numbers. Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia tripled its outlet coverage with BeatRoute route optimization and SFA, as the Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia case study shows. For the strike rate, the Scheduling AI Agent puts the outlets most likely to order, or most overdue, at the top of each rep's day; in BeatRoute's figures, productive visits rose from 45% to 78% with it.
To see your own beats measured this way, book a demo and bring the outlet list for one territory.
Frequently asked questions
How many outlets should a field sales rep visit in a day?
Work it out from the outlet list. Decide how often each outlet needs a visit, since a busy store may need one every week and a small shop one every two weeks. Add up the visits in a cycle and divide by the working days in it. Then check that the answer fits a real day once travel and a proper visit at each stop are counted. If it does not, the territory needs another rep, or the smallest outlets need fewer visits.
What is the difference between field sales and trade marketing?
Trade marketing plans what the brand offers retailers: schemes, displays, promotions and incentives. Field sales carries those plans into the shop and reports whether they happened. When the two teams work from separate records, head office cannot tell a scheme that failed from one that never reached the counter.
