3 Reasons Why Field Sales Reps Are Frustrated With Their Jobs

There are various reasons why field sales reps are frustrated. Here we offer you three.

Knowing our customers and potential customers is a part of our culture. It’s what makes us successful. As SaaS providers, we spend a lot of time getting to know them before any transaction takes place. Our sales process, like all others, have several steps prior to converting customers from prospects. We utilize these stages to insert touch points that allow us to gather information and get to know them better. After interacting with these touch points literally every day we’re able to predict, to some degree, what’s going to come out of a prospect’s mouth when we meet with them. The focus of this blog deals with the very reason why field reps come to us in the first place. They usually know (sometimes they don’t) the aspects of their job that cause them the most stress. Often, however, they’re unable to identify root causes. In which case they spend most of their time discussing the symptoms, leaving it up to us to make a diagnosis. Probably even more important is when management is unaware of the pain points that terrorize their sales employees daily. These pains usually result in a loss of productivity, awful workflow habits, or even worse – sales rep turnover. Nevertheless, we’ve found that most problems can be remedied and while every salesperson is different, there are common challenges that each will face at some point in their career. Here are three.

Lack of Organization In 2016 there are still companies that have no tools in place for their sales force believe it or not, and somehow they wonder why so much is out of order. Excel, email, and memory are considered the 3 key components of their customer management system. Why? Well reasons vary, but the point here is that this is a recipe for a mess and it drives sales reps crazy – the good ones. There are at least two things that will happen with a company like this. 1) A company will lose talent – often the efficient “I need more organization!” type. 2) Or they will be host to the “I’m content! I don’t have to do much.” type. Either scenario is terrible for the company seeking to become successful. Aside from the obvious benefits of having more organization to sales teams and processes, companies should consider how not having proper systems in place can lead to unhappy goal-oriented team members. The downside effect is magnified in situations where reps are working hundreds of miles apart. With remote field sales reps, systems and operations need to be even better.

Tools As in the example mentioned above, the lack of tools can lead to a frustrated team of salespeople no doubt. Of equal importance for companies is selecting the right tools. Picking the wrong tools happen pretty frequently and causes strife in many ways. Therefore, managers should always be on look out to streamline and simplify as many processes as possible. Moreover, get buy-in from your team before committing to new applications. I recently had a conversation with an owner at a food processing company. He had a team of 15 sales reps and was in the process of onboarding them onto a platform that he intended would help him manage employee work flow processes. The gentleman was a pretty nice guy. Adamant about the app that he selected, he quickly paid an onboarding fee that was not cheap. I asked him had he trialed his reps on the system. He said no, that the application did what he needed and that was most important. The owner insinuated that he would apply force when it came to employee adoption. I suggested to him that introducing an application this way was not the best idea. SaaS companies offer trials for a reason. Take full advantage of them. The primary reason being that you have an opportunity to test real life programs for free and learn how your employees respond to them. The best software programs are easy to use, intuitive, and designed to match your workflows properly. You won’t have an accurate representation of this until you put your guys on. You’ll learn what they like, dislike and the degrees of each. Sure, the food processing owner can make his team use the application he selected, but should not be surprised when he doesn’t get the results he is seeking. For optimal results his reps should buy into the application, if they do not then at least two bad things could happen. They may resent the app along with the operational change. As a result, not use the tool accordingly. This means that his reps aren’t benefiting, but also the owner isn’t finding value in the way he originally thought. Too often do companies learn after the fact that an application is not a good fit. Or even worse, that employees hate it. These decisions are more impactful than some companies anticipate. They lose time, money, data, and perhaps valuable talent if they do not take the proper steps when deciding on new tools to adopt.

Travel, Travel, Travel! Pace Productivity Inc. estimates that outside sales reps spend 6.6 hours, or roughly 13% of their week traveling. I happen to believe that the number is significantly more. I would guess around 30% of a rep’s time is spent traveling. I’ve personally witness scenarios where that number is up to 40% in a given week. Now don’t get me wrong a trip to South Beach every so often to meet with prospective customers is great, but work weeks with high ratios of travel time can weigh on your sales force if they occur too often. Being away from family, the inability to maintain a healthy diet, or merely the act of traveling itself can drain valuable energy – energy that is needed for client activity. Or if you’re anything like me, being stuck in traffic for long periods of time is enough to make you want to jump out of the car and go Tasmanian Devil on everything in sight (joking, kinda!). Being irritated from bad commutes is the last thing you need to be before going in for an appointment. Companies can help to manage this by limiting the amount time their reps spend traveling, allowing for more stress relieving activities during long stretches of travel, and utilizing applications that optimize travel logistics. This can ensure that your team is better prepared mentally to make a great impression as they interface with clients or prospects.

3 Reasons Why Field Sales Reps Are Frustrated With Their Jobs