The Importance of Customer-Facing Time and How to Increase It

Customer-facing time is an essential part of sales. By interacting with customers, outside sales reps and marketing agents can better understand their needs and wants, leading to better sales outcomes (quantity and/or satisfaction) and eventually to more customer-centric products.

In retail, increased customer face time with a store manager means that the salesperson will have a better grasp of the peculiarities of each point-of-sale and will build sales orders that will lead to improvements in product turnover ratios and less out-of-stocks.

However, customer-facing time is increasingly considered a rare luxury and many are the threats to it: Endless team meetings, traffic delays, scattered sales territories, email overloads, reporting and paperwork, etc.

An outside sales software can be instrumental in increasing customer-facing time. By implementing an outside sales software solution, sales managers are able to see several improvements that can lead to increased customer-facing time, such as the following:

• Better territory management
  With an outside sales software, sales managers can visualize territories on a map, and plan them in order to minimize travel distances.
• Less travel time
  Besides territory mapping, a state-of-the-art outside sales software will also offer route optimization capabilities, calculating the shortest daily route for each rep.
• Less paperwork, reporting and emailing
  An outside sales software with mobile app will allow sales reps to access product collaterals, place orders, fill out forms, take pictures, verify equipment, and make visit notes, among others, all in their mobile devices, while giving managers access to the information collected in real time.

VisitBasis is a complete outside sales software solution that delivers all the tools your reps need to succeed at their fingertips. The VisitBasis App is available for unlimited downloads on Google Play or App Store.

See today what an outside sales software solution can do for your organization – try VisitBasis for free!

 

Mobile Sales Force Automation

 

 

In recent years technology stepped far forward allowing people to shop at the click of a button. Nevertheless field sales representatives still have to interact with customers in person. Field team management for CPG and FMCG companies includes coordinating outside sales representatives, who are constantly on the go, and working with big amount of data from retail locations.

Field sales automation covers all the variety of point-of-sale activities allowing companies to manage field teams from anywhere. Field sales automation is aimed to plan, execute, and evaluate field team activities, such as order taking, retail audits, merchandising, and promotional campaigns, in the most efficient way. By implementing a comprehensive field sales automation solution, a company can make store visits more effective, reduce expenses and improve customer service.

Present-day field sales automation solutions are fast to deploy and easy to use. By implementing a field sales automation solution for field team management you get:

• Increased sales reps productivity due to reduced data-collection time, built-in photo-reports and route optimization and no time spent on reporting.
• Paperless data collection and storage as all the information from points-of-sale is fully synced between field teams and the office.
• Fraud prevention by targeting your field activities using time tracking and GPS monitoring features.
• Instant analytics with real-time dashboards and reports, sophisticated data filters and built-in analytic tools.

Today there are a lot of field sales automation solutions on the market designed to manage different kinds of field activities. However, not all of them are capable to give managers a complete picture of retail conditions for data-driven decision-making. Once you’ve decided to automate your field sales, the next step is to choose a field sales automation software solution.

To choose the right type of field sales automation software for your business, take into account the size of your company, identify the key business processes that need to be automated, look for a comprehensive and scalable solution, and consider the opportunities of further integration.

Here at VisitBasis we’ve focused on delivering comprehensive a field sales automation system that integrates completely with every process in your business. VisitBasis field sales automation software is designed for sales professionals who want to reduce business expenses and improve sales force productivity.

Sign up today at www.visitbasis.com to get the most affordable and user-friendly field sales automation solution on the market. Free downloads in Google Play and App Store for any number of users.

Top 5 Reasons for Field Team Management Software Implementation

Today due to the new mobile technology field team management becomes much more effective. By using a field team management software solution, a manager can set up retail visits and tasks for the whole field team in several minutes, and analyze all the information from points of sale live, as there as field reps perform tasks at points of sale. Empowered with mobile tools for store data collection, your field team members are able to perform all point-of-sale activities using just their tablets and smartphones, with no need of visiting the office to get the schedule and report back.

The new way of field team management provides faster data workflow and reduces time for decision-making. If your company is not already using a field team management solution, consider the opportunities to start. Below you can find the list of reasons why implement field team management software.

1. Simplify planning – Field team management software allows easily organizing the schedule of visits for field reps individually, or in bulk, for any period of time.
2. Automate organization – All the visits and tasks are instantly displayed in tablets and smartphones of merchandisers due to automatic synchronization.
3. Stay up-to-date – field team management software allows managers and supervisors to get live retail visit confirmation and monitor field team members on the map in real time, including their routes, the arrival time, and time spent at each point-of-sale.
4. Streamline data workflow – Get all the informations on customers, locations, products, users, schedule, tasks, orders, audit results, customer surveys and more in one place. Field team management software allows managing all kinds of operations in the field using just one application. All the data is stored in the Cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.
5. Shorten the reporting process – Mobile forms allow collecting data very quickly and accurate, eliminating paperwork and minimizing mistakes. All the data collected at stores is automatically transferred to corporate database and is available for integration with company’s back-end system, export or analysis. Field team management software allows getting ultimate custom reports and dashboards in seconds.

Manage your field team more efficiently, using latest mobile technology. Register at www.visitbasis.com for the free trial and schedule a free live demo to see how it works.