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!

 

What Your Field Sales Reps Can Do Using a Field Sales Mobile App

 

Traditional field team management can’t give you an answer, what your field reps are doing at this very moment. By implementing a certain kind of field team management solution and empowering your field reps with a mobile app for retail execution, you get an opportunity to literally see what your reps see at retail locations and get timely GPS-confirmed data as soon as visits and tasks are being performed.

Using field sales mobile app allows your field reps to get access to all the data and tools needed to perform store visits. Field team management software comes with the ability to create mobile forms for everything that needs to be checked, so your field sales reps can perform all their duties using just their tablets or smartphones. Here is the list of the most important things your field reps can do during a retail visit.

• Manage visits and tasks, having mobile access to visits scheduled by the office and being able to add visits and tasks from mobile devices.
• Manage customer and product databases, having access to all the information about products and retail locations, including multimedia attachments (planograms, presentations, contracts, photos), price lists, multi-stock lists, assets, contact information and more.
• Optimize routes to get the shortest pace for the workday and minimize travel time and expenses.
• Place product orders and returns that are instantly visible at the office. Barcode scanner, automated data entry, multi-stock list and customizable invoices make short work of selling. Your field reps can view prior order quantities and order history on their mobile devices to create an order that makes sense.
• Check out in-store and shelf positions of products, parameters of the layout, pricing, stock availability to make sure your products are in the right place, at the right price, at the right time, and always available to customers. Customizable task templates and automatic synchronization allow your field sales reps to easily collect data and instantly report back without spending a minute.
• Perform competitor analysis to see, where exactly your competitors’ products are located and how they are priced, so you can get a good indication of industry leaders marketing strategies.
• Report point-of-sale status and employee knowledge. Using a field sales app your field reps can easily report the cleanliness of a point-of-sales, store equipment condition and employee knowledge about your product to give you information on how retailers take care of the products they sell.
• Control promotions and manage POS materials. Field sales app allows your field reps to make sure the promotions are being followed in compliance with the marketing strategy and promotional displays, floor stickers, posters and others POS materials are properly used at retail locations.

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.

What Are the Essential Mobile Applications for Sales Reps

The list of the essential mobile applications for field sales reps include apps that play multimedia presentations on mobile devices, keep track of the miles you drive for business, generate invoices and time sheets, create mobile dashboards of various kinds of available information, create text notes, store your data in the Cloud, provide electronic signatures and so on and so forth. So, how many apps a sales rep has to install to become more effective? Actually, the answer is one. The shortest way to increase productivity of outside sales reps is to empower them with an up-to-date all-in-one application for field sales, which allows managing all field sales activities from one place.

Despite all of the listed features are really important for sales reps productivity, nobody can guarantee that if they install all “the essential mobile applications for sales reps” they will become more efficient and productive. Moreover, the result can be the opposite. An outside sales rep is constantly on the go and has to deal with a lot of people and data from different retail locations. If a sales rep has to constantly switch between “the most important applications”, he can easily miss a comprehensive picture of retail conditions or even blunder away some critically important events and details if he forgot to run the appropriate app.

The simple solution to this problem is to organize your sales data and sales tools in one place, making it easy to access, manage, analyze, transfer and share. Today there are many all-in-one field sales applications on the market that allow sales reps to manage sales operations, product and customer databases, communicate with the office, send reports and analyze retail performance. To choose between numerous applications for sales reps, analyze your everyday work routines, so you can understand, what features you are looking for. Although the choice of an app for sales reps depends on specific needs and everyday activities, we still can identify the main features that a comprehensive field sales mobile app should provide:

1. Scheduling visits – A comprehensive field sales apps allow field reps to see the visits and tasks planned by the office, schedule retail visits on the go, if they need to squeeze an extra visit for the day, add tasks to visits and optimize travel routes.
2. Order taking – The main job of sales reps is selling, so this is the most important thing to be automated. Mobile order forms and automated data entry allow submitting orders very quickly, so a sales rep can be more effective taking more orders per day.
3. Automatic synchronization – This feature allows field sales reps to report back without spending a minute or visiting the office. All the data collected, including orders/returns, photos, and text notes is instantly transferred to corporate database and available to office managers.
4. Offline capabilities – The most sophisticated applications for sales reps allows capturing store data even offline to synchronize it when Internet connection is available.
5. Cloud data storage – The up-to-date field sales applications run in the Cloud, so both field sales reps and the office managers have 24/7 access to information from anywhere. Cloud service allows working with big amounts of data, spending less time to aggregating, transferring and sharing information.
6. Mobile tools for retail data collection – Automated task templates, barcode scanner, built-in notes and photo reports, electronic signatures, multi-stock lists allow field reps to easily collect store data, reducing data-entry time and minimizing mistakes.

The days are long gone when increasing sales reps’ productivity meant installing a dozen of applications or a bulky and expensive CRM system. In today’s mobile-driven world it’s possible to find an all-in-one mobile solution for field reps that makes short work of common sales tasks. To get one of these free, register at www.visitbasis.com

Field Team Management Software: Overcoming the Resistance to Technology and Micromanagement

When implementing any kind of mobile workforce tracking software, many companies encounter resistance from field reps. There are different reasons why your field reps are not happy with the changes. Many people are reluctant to accept any changes, and field reps are not an exception, especially when it comes to the opportunity for managers to track all their activities in real time.

Overcoming the Resistance to Technology

First, and the most obvious is that field reps think it’ll be difficult to use the new technology. In this case the main actions to solve the problem should be the following:

• Corporate meetings to demonstrate how it works
• Field reps training on new tools and environment

To minimize the risk of the old-school reps’ refusal to accept changes, opt for up-to-date mobile software solutions for field team management. Today there are plenty of mobile applications for field reps working on common tablets and smartphones they all already use, which provide simple, user-friendly interface and an opportunity for reps to bring-their-own-device. When your field reps are familiar with the operating platform and features of the device they do not have to worry about how to deal with the interface or spend time to be trained how to operate it.

Going Over Opposition to Micromanagement

When it comes to implementation of field reps tracking software, your field reps’ first thought is that the company does not trust them. The first step to change this opinion is to convince your field reps that to keep up with the times is critically important for the business, explaining in details the benefits of the new technology both for the company and for reps themselves.

Field team management software allows field service-based organizations to quickly adapt to changing business landscape and be a step ahead of the competition, constantly improving field team performance and customer service. For field reps having all necessary tools to perform various tasks at points of sale on a single device means being more engaged and productive. Electronic task templates and order forms, automated data entry and synchronization save a considerable amount of hours, making field reps more targeted with their time, negotiating with customers and driving larger order size.

To get more information about field team management, visit www.visitbasis.com and get your free access to field team management software, request a demo or read our previous articles.

A Three-Step Guide to Finding the Right App for Field Team Management

The Takeaway Tips For Choosing Field Team Management Software

How Your Sales Reps Can Improve Customer Service