“What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
You’ve heard this saying before, right? It’s not entirely true. For instance, you might not know someone’s hacked your bank account and stolen your money. But it will definitely hurt when you try to check out at the grocery store and your debit card is declined.
But there are times in life when complete ignorance does equal total bliss. Do you really want to know how many calories are in that delicious piece of chocolate cake? Didn’t think so…
Unfortunately, ignorance is never the preferred scenario in sales. You need to know exactly what’s happening in your department at all times. That way you can make adjustments when necessary and hit quota on a regular basis.
When it comes to selling, the opposite of ignorance is sales visibility. Keep reading to learn what field sales visibility is, why it’s important, and how SPOTIO helps you achieve it.
What is Field Sales Visibility?
Let’s start with a definition:
Field sales visibility is what sales managers experience when they have access to detailed insights into both the sales-related actions their field reps take and the results they achieve.
If, for example, you have a reliable way to determine where your sales reps are at any given moment during the workweek, how many times they’ve visited/called/emailed the prospects in their pipeline, and each rep’s average conversion rate, you have field sales visibility.
Make sense? Great, now let’s talk about why field sales visibility is so important…
Why is Field Sales Visibility Important?
Field sales visibility leads to better insights, more accurate forecasts, and, ultimately, more sales for your organization. Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits:
Better Insights
Imagine you’re evaluating two different sales reps in your department…
Sales Rep A is a total rockstar and has an unheard of close rate. Sales Rep B, on the other hand, is really struggling. In fact, their numbers are so poor, you might have to let them go. But before you do, you decide to investigate why Sales Rep A is so much more successful.
Using a sales visibility tool like SPOTIO, you realize that Sales Rep B works just as hard as Sales Rep A. The difference is the follow-up email. Sales Rep A has a dynamite sequence that converts prospects into customers at a consistent clip.
Once Sales Rep B adopts this email sequence, their numbers skyrocket, you don’t have to fire him for poor performance, and your entire company is better off.
Sales visibility will give you insight into rep activity and resulting success (or lack thereof). This will allow you to pinpoint team strengths and weakness and plan more strategic campaigns that result in greater sales numbers.
Accurate Forecasts
Forecasting is one of the trickiest jobs for sales managers. It’s also one of the most important. Fortunately, sales visibility can make the entire process easier and more effective.
If you know that your field reps visit 100 prospects a week and have an average close rate of 10%, you can feel confident that you’ll secure 10 new customers every seven days. You can then use this information to estimate company sales on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.
Think of sales visibility as your department’s crystal ball. By knowing exactly how your field reps perform, you can predict the future with amazing accuracy.
More Sales
Ultimately, sales visibility leads to more closed deals.
Why? Because it will allow you to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. You’ll then be able to adjust both team and individual rep strategy to match.
Let’s return to our first example. Sales Rep B was failing, but because you had visibility into their process, you were able to help them change their approach to follow up emails. The result was more sales for and greater revenue for your company. Win!
SPOTIO: Visibility Made Easy
Okay, so we agree that sales visibility is crucial to success, right? The question now is, how do you achieve it? Simple: you sign up for SPOTIO and let our software do the work for you.
Here are a few industry-leading features our platform gives you access to:
Location Tracking
You manage field reps, which means your team spends most of their working hours outside of the office. With SPOTIO, you can track sales rep movements while they’re on the clock. Doing so will help build trust and accountability between managers and reps.
It will also help management determine when to retrain based on skill, rather than effort, and pinpoint potential inefficiencies in sales rep travel paths.
Note: GPS location tracking can be turned off if your team prefers more privacy while they work.
Activity Capture
Location tracking is great for accountability purposes and will give you insights regarding the skill and efficiency levels of your team. But if you really want to supercharge field rep success, you need to learn about the activities they complete (or don’t complete) on a daily basis.
SPOTIO makes it easy to track every visit, call, email, and text your reps send to engage with prospects. Better yet, this information is automatically uploaded to your CRM software of choice for safekeeping and future analysis.
With this level of visibility, you’ll be able to determine which actions lead to sales and why.
Reports and Insights
It’s difficult (read: nearly impossible) to improve sales team performance without access to cold, hard data. SPOTIO is your one-stop-shop for performance reporting.
Quickly analyze sales rep location and activity information. Then use it to design better sales strategies, more accurate forecasts, and real-time updates to upper management. Our platform gives you complete visibility into your company’s sales pipeline.
More than that, SPOTIO’s analytics dashboard can be used to create Leaderboards, which will help stoke friendly competition between reps and help them strive for greater success.
Grow Sales With Real-Time Insights
To grow sales for your company, you need field sales visibility. SPOTIO will give it to you. Request a free demo of our software to experience the in-depth insights, more accurate forecasts, and higher sales numbers our platform provides.
