Field Sales App: A Complete Guide for Consumer Goods Companies

‘Field Sales‘ is a traditional term that sums up all the sales and marketing activities executed by different sales representatives on ground. From visiting retailers to execute marketing campaigns, every field activity undertaken by the sales team in the distribution and retail market comprises. While a company may execute a wide range of activities from order collection to loyalty or returns management, it can be difficult to track and monitor the progress of every activity/representative in the field. This is where the field sales app comes into play.

Today, FMCG companies uses it to track, automate and increase productivity of field sales teams, to analyze the market trends and increase their product sales accordingly. 

Now that we have an idea of the application’s primary function, let’s understand the application to its core.

What is a Field Sales App?

It is a platform that is engineered to gives on the go workflow automation for field sales activity and digitization of ground sales operations to sales representatives on their mobile phones. This application enhances their productivity by allowing the field managers to effectively manage different aspects of retailer visits in their territory while boosting sales behavior and reducing costs. With businesses touching new peaks and cut-throat competition, the technology used by the app, provides FMCG organizations with an innovative set of tools & mobility to simplify the everyday tasks performed by their sales force.

Why do you need a Field Sales App?

Its primary focus revolves around reducing the time taken around executing different sales representatives’ core activities. Such applications reduce the time spent around various administrative tasks and the paperwork involved in the process. 

Most importantly, using such an application for executing dynamic operations, allows organizations and their employees to collaborate closely with their central sales team and manage day-to-day field operations seamlessly.

Considering the range of activities performed by an individual sales rep like Scheduling visits, Onboarding Retailers, Collecting orders, Accounting for Claims, Managing Loyalty etc., the need for a sales team app is quite evident for FMCG and Consumer Goods companies in the digital age.

Let’s find out some relevant reasons to back our claim in the next section. 

Why do FMCG Companies Need a Field Sales App for Sales Reps?

FMCG companies appoint sales representatives to undertake a multitude of field activities such as contacting prospects, visiting distributors and retailers, executing visual merchandising campaigns, collecting orders while trying to upsell/cross sell leveraging company’s schemes and offers. An ideal app is essential for the automation of all these workflows and it also enables the company to get insights on the activities in real time. Moreover, some app provide reports and analytics to help companies understand flaws in the sales execution in the field and resolve them beforehand.

Today, the FMCG & CPG segment’s key players have adapted to a management application to unlock their potential. 

Here are some of the major capabilities which the Application provides:

1. Workflow Automation

Field Sales software provide businesses with the flexibility to plan their operations in advance. The automation of workflow eases the workload, and streamlines sales tasks. The app empowers the company to prevent wastage of manpower in mundane tasks and enables the sales representatives execute ordered field activities.

2. Market Expansion

An app helps the company to explore new territories and provides insights about new outlets. It enables the company to conduct viability test before expansion thereby enabling successful expansion.

3. Effective Trade and Promotion Marketing

It aids target marketing and enables the company monitor the progress and flaws in their marketing campaigns. It enables FMCG companies to carry out effective marketing operations through analysis of utilization of schemes and activation programs.

4. Understanding market trends

It is important to understand the demands of the market and even forecast the demand in order to sell FMCG and consumer products. Distributor, retailer and consumer engagement plays a significant role in determining market trends. Therefore, some new age app contains functions for promoters to aid the company with insights about consumer demands in general and modern trade.

5. Wider Reach at lower cost

It empowers the business with greater reach through optimized sales process at lower cost. Features like Route Optimization and WhatsApp BOT enable companies to get a better reach in a cost effective way.

Challenges Associated with using Old Field Sales App for Sale Reps

Technology evolves every minute with innovation. Earlier, when the concept of app for sales reps came into existence, it was mainly for tracking. However,  these apps have been modified and upgraded with the passing time and you can find a lot of new features in today’s apps for sales reps. Some of the challenges associated with old field sales apps are as follows.

• Adoption issues

Even after the app is deployed with thousands of gimmicky features, companies often face the issue of their sales reps not being able to use the application to its full potential. Usability of interface makes a huge difference when it comes to adoption. The app must be designed to be easy-to-use for the end user i.e. the sales representative.

• No insights about sales behavior

Top app for sales reps enable a company and it’s sales manager to monitor field activities. However, they do not provide any insights about sales behaviour of teams working on ground thereby incapable of taking their sales output to the next level. An advanced app must be so designed that it provides insights on key behavioral indicators (KBI’s) besides KPI’s, which then can be worked upon to improve sales output automatically.

• Misaligned action

While most FMCG companies adopt this app, very few could avail all its benefits. The reason behind is that, although it bridged the communication gap, it fails to align the actions of sales reps with business  goals that companies set for themselves. The best solution to this problem is adopting a Goal-Driven CRM SFA Platform to aid the companies to align their sales reps in accordance with their field business goals.

• Lack of effective insights

Most apps provide real time data and reports. However, it can be difficult for the company to analyze the field data and identify a problem in real time basis. The features like CuesBOT aids a company with problem detection through automated analytics and aids field managers with consumable insights on problems in their territories, also  helping them with possible solutions to take immediate action.

Choose the Best Field Sales App for your Brand

Considering the wide variety of options that the market is flooded with, you might get confused about the options to go with. While all the software’s might look promising with their approach, remember, not every field sales app will come in handy for your particular business. 

Further, collaborating & executing operations over such a vast lineup of operations becomes a mammoth task if you don’t have access to the right tools at play. Therefore, we suggest the use of Field Sales App. 

BeatRoute’s Goal-Driven Sales Force application is focused on scaling operations by augmenting entire sales and marketing operations. Its intuitive UI makes this application easy-to-use and it’s out of the box zero code capability saves time for FMCG & Consumer Goods Brands while deployment. Its unified approach towards marketing & allows you to stage route-to-market programs with all your retailers, dealers & distributors, over a single mobile platform.

Use the following criterion in choosing your ideal field sales app for your business:

• Performance & Scalability

Remember, your software should be able to support the overall size of your team and sales operations in GT, MT & B2B/HoReCa. Your ideal field sales app should have all the necessary performance capabilities to support your entire sales bandwidth simultaneously. Even if your company has just begun with a small team, we advise you to base your decisions around the future & scalability while selecting the field sales management software.

• Integrations

As mentioned earlier, the field sales app requires integration with a variety of upstream and downstream applications & software like Distributor Management System, ERP, Retailer App etc. to function effectively. Therefore, while you are selecting your ideal solution, keep the possible integrations in mind or even better to pick a holistic platform with SFA, DMS, Retailer App capabilities built into it. 

• Multi-device support

Mobility is one such feature that makes the field sales app a reliable option. Therefore, you must choose an app that is compatible with Android and iOS so that it can be handled by sales reps easily on their smartphone. You may further inquire if the product requires application downloading or is web-based.

• Online Reviews & Free Demos

The best way to know the advantages and disadvantages of this field sales app is knowing the first hand user experience and checking it for oneself. You may check out the online reviews of a product on Google play, Capterra and other such platforms available on the internet. 

Summary

The impact of FMCG sales on the customers, goes simultaneously with the exposure of field sales software. Now that you know what is field sales software, you know this amazing technological adaptation to work, businesses (especially the FMCG & CPG ) can increase productivity & sales.  

Considering the function, operation & execution of GTM workflows over Applications, it is indeed the future & beyond! Request for the Field Sales App demo today.