Driving Field Sales Executives and Managers

Primary objective of any brand is to achieve sales target and the same gets driven at all levels of sales team. But the sales number is merely an output of many inputs – market dynamics, pricing strategy, marketing strategy & schemes, motivated sales team, disciplined sales team etc. Today we will discuss the important parameters that can be tracked to improve field working of a field sales executive/manager which generally gets overlooked in chasing the end objective of sales target.

Generally followed parameters while driving field discipline of field sales executive/ managers are – PJP/Beat compliance, number of outlet visits. But there is more to these two parameters which are important and should be tracked. Let’s look at the few important parameters:

Time spent in each outlet: Outlet plays a major role while driving business for a brand. And time spent analysis shows quality of visit done at the outlets. To extract business from an outlet it is important that sales executive/manager spends sufficient time engaging with the outlet manager/owner so that priority of the brand gets driven in his/her mind.
Activities done in each store: It helps in driving objectivity of the visit to the outlet and helps sales executive/manager to spend the time at outlet doing the right things increasing probability of visit to be more productive.
Total time spent in stores: It helps identify total productive working hours of a field sales executive/manager by giving an insight on his/her travel time, break time etc. These insights can be used to further optimise productivity by doing judicious route/area planning.
Total number of working hours: It helps identify if the sales executive/manager is spending sufficient number of working hours in a day and accordingly review discussions can be driven.
Total number unique outlet visited: It is often seen that major % of visits of sales executive/manager consists of less than 50% of the outlets he/she is supposed to visit, specially where there is no beat plan due to business model of the brand. It is important to keep a focus that all outlet mapped to a sales executive/manager is visited at a certain decided frequency to get optimum business output from all the outlet associated with the brand.
Total number new outlet added: For any business to grow, it is important to get more outlets to participate as a partner to the business. Thus, it is important to track the same.

It is for brand to decide if all these parameters discussed above get driven as KPIs or as a part of regular reviews, but it is important for brands to think beyond target reviews and simple PJP compliance.

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