Do these four things and you’ll immediately increase your performance as a Field Sales Rep.
1. Plan Your Travel Weeks Out
Territory Mapping
I’m no longer surprised when I hear about reps who wake up in the morning and decide right then which locations they would like to hit up that day. It happens way too often for comfort. As a manager of field sales reps, I’ve found this to be unsuccessful in the long run and one of the most likely ways to be inefficient with their time. Instead, I would direct my teams to take a day or two to plan their calendars for the entire month, or at very least, two weeks out. I did this for several reasons. For starters, it forces you to stop and think deeply about your customer acquisition strategy instead of hitting locations that are convenient for you on that given day. Secondly, you are taking a longer-term view instead of being random. Lastly, by spending time simply viewing your territory on a map, you are likely cutting travel time by up to 40% due logistical inefficiencies you’ll find. Be prudent with your time. More travel time means less opportunities you are meeting with accounts. After all, you’re reading this because you are wanting to increase your performance as a Field Sales Rep, right?
2. Organize Your Account Data
There are number of different tools available to help you organize your data. Many of them go unused simply because the sales rep isn’t aware that they exist or does not want to invest time into learning how to use them. The latter point is an interesting one because the individuals who are using the “I don’t have the time” argument are often the ones who waste time sifting for important information about their accounts via old email chains or notes they have written from past visits. Ensuring that important history details are available instantly, relationship management tools will help you stay on top of your accounts. Organizing your account data will allow you to spend more time on the important parts of your role.
3. Analyze Your Account Data
We are in the Golden Age for Information, and technology is only going to become more advanced. By not analyzing the data around your sales operations, targeted markets, and customers you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to the competition. Please understand that I do not mean merely pondering over sales numbers, but instead understanding output correlations based on different activities that you are employing, as an example. To be a highly productive field sales rep you need to know if what you are doing is working or not, and why. Knowing something isn’t working to your satisfaction prompts a good performer to tweak some things. Historically, many companies have set aside this function to a specific person or persons due to the time and expertise required to draw significant intel from data. However, with the evolution of available tools and technology, analytical processes are now being automated. This means less time it will take for sales personnel to invest in data analysis.
4. Communicate With Your Colleagues Often
One of the challenges of being an outside sales rep is that in many cases you are working apart from your colleagues. This limits knowledge transfer and, by extension, performance potential while increasing the likelihood of duplicating mistakes that someone else has probably made and learned from already. There are many benefits to interacting with colleagues on a frequent basis. For example, sharing of best practices usually will occur, employee morale boosts due to comradery that develops, and a hint of friendly competition can lend itself to the equation as well. A career as a successful “lone wolf” in field sales is much harder than one that has support from a team. Positive results will follow when you reach out to your colleagues. Trust me!
Some helpful tools:
Outfield for market analytics, team communication, account management, territory mapping, etc.
Groupme for team communication
Slack for team communication and file sharing
Batchgeo for territory mapping
Linkedin for lead generation and management
Yammer for field collaboration
Mailchimp for email marketing and campaign analysis
If you know of some awesome tools feel free to share below.
