With the introduction of feasible mass data collection, the gap between outside sales reps and persons working in marketing driven roles is closing. For many years those responsible for driving sales and the individuals focused on understanding and increasing demand for products worked in silos with separate agendas. The major problem with this is fairly obvious among those paying attention – the two groups often were on different pages when it came to their outlook on customer trends. Marketing associates’ understanding of their customer groups usually were formed based on traditional marketing initiatives (surveys, primary & secondary research, focus groups, etc.) Meanwhile, the outside reps’ understanding of the marketplace was built primarily on directing more substantive relationships. Even so, the best sales reps, with deep rooted tenured relationships, can describe their customer archetype profile. Additionally, from real experience, they can speak to the differences in the markets that they serviced. In either case, each group had valuable knowledge. It just didn’t crossover, which has a number of consequences.
Outside Sales Teams: Know your customers before your competition does.
Internal Disorganization Consequences
A real life consequence of this gap between the two ecosystems can show up in overall customer acquisition costs. Consider the manufacturing company seeking to better understand demand around why customers preferred a certain type of washer and dryer option within the Northeast region. Due to this company’s bandwidth constraints, the marketing department opted to outsource this market research project to a third party. All the while this same company has an outside sales force responsible for visiting retail shops and interacting with consumers directly. The company unfortunately doesn’t take advantage of intel their field personnel have acquired over the course of their work activities. After all, this is not exactly surprising. A factor that plays into the under utilization of internal knowledge has to do with intel not being presented in an organized digestible form. No doubt the outside rep knows what he or she is talking about as it relates to their market, but quite often the information they’ve acquired is not contained in a proper form that’s common place in the marketing world.
Outside sales analytics can provide valuable customer insight, giving you the edge you need to compete in the market.
Collecting Data in Outside Sales
With the evolution of mobile-based technology, the best SaaS programs for outside reps enable them an ability to gather valuable information about their markets via a tool as simple as a call form reps are responsible for completing each visit. While simple, call forms can be very powerful, especially when aggregated. The best mobile apps for field sales reps, come with the ability to automate linking call forms to specific client accounts while also utilizing the mobile devices’ GPS capabilities. To be clear, this is all happening in the background, but what we should be aware of is that the program is collecting valuable intel that is location based. Take for example the scenario described above, when the company’s field reps enter into the store and interact with various customers. He or she submits their findings via the call form. Now consider that this rep makes at least 50 visits a month to various locations within the Northeast region. Over several months, the rep has collected enough intel through his natural work flow, to provide valuable insights specific to their markets. More importantly, because the call forms are database driven, they have rendered information in an organized way for which marketing people are likely to find value in – graphs, tables, all of the usual stuff. Through the volume of customer interactions experienced by the field sales rep, the company found at no additional cost, that customers in the Northeast were purchasing the select washer and dryer because they were much smaller. In this region, homes were built with smaller hall ways, which meant a significant number of customers needed appliances that could move throughout. This little tidbit of knowledge made the company that much more intelligent in their strategic marketing initiatives moving forward.
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