Are your field reps reaching their full potential? In all likelihood, the answer is “no.” For most companies, field sales processes are wildly inefficient, which keeps outside sellers from talking with more prospects and closing more deals.
According to HubSpot, the average sales rep only spends 39% of their time selling. The other 61% of their working hours are dedicated to prospecting for high-quality leads, traveling to and from sales meetings, updating CRM software, etc.
In order for your field reps to reach their full potential, they need to streamline these non-selling tasks and boost the amount of time they spend building relationships and closing deals.
In this article, we’ll explore the three field sales challenges mentioned above in greater detail and give you viable solutions for each. Using this knowledge, you’ll be able to empower your sales force and boost revenue numbers, guaranteed.
Let’s get started!
The Challenges of Modern Field Sales
Let’s be honest, modern field sales is difficult. Outside sellers face a myriad of challenges — many of them unavoidable. But there are definitely ways to make your prospecting, travel time, and CRM upkeep much more efficient.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these three challenges and explore solutions you can use to easily increase sales team productivity.
1. Prospecting
Prospecting is absolutely necessary. Without quality leads, you won’t have anyone to visit, speak with, and sell products and/or services to. But the prospecting process can take a lot of valuable time away from more revenue-generating activities.
To help your field reps reach their full potential, you need to improve the prospecting process for your team. Oftentimes, this means investing in technology.
The Solution to the Prospecting Problem
Technology solutions can make the prospecting process much more productive, which will allow your sellers to spend more time in the field and less time stuck behind their computers.
SPOTIO, in particular, has many tools that help field reps quickly build customer profiles and find accurate lead data in their target markets. These tools include Lead Machine, B2B Lead Machine, and Google Places.
Lead Machine: Lead Machine is the perfect prospecting tool for field reps because it allows them to easily identify valuable leads and manage sales canvassing territories. Close more deals by speaking to the right prospects that fit your ideal customer profile.
B2B Lead Machine: B2B Lead Machine is similar to the Lead Machine tool we just covered, except it’s designed for sellers in the B2B niche. Use this tool to find prospects based on location, industry, company size, etc. Then assign them to specific territories and/or sales reps within the SPOTIO platform.
Google Places: Google Places inside SPOTIO enables field reps to become more efficient by helping them focus their attention on prospects who have high purchase intent. Use this tool to build a unique customer profile for your company, view a map of all the businesses with a specific territory, and filter information by name, email, business type, etc. — without ever having to leave SPOTIO.
Prospecting is both necessary and time-consuming. Take back the day for your field reps by equipping them with a proven platform to streamline the prospecting process. Doing so will allow them to spend more time in the field closing deals.
2. Travel Time
Until humans learn to teleport, travel time is another challenge that field reps face on a daily basis. Your team has to beat the streets and meet potential customers, which means they spend a large portion of their days in the car, driving from prospect to prospect.
While travel is necessary, it doesn’t count as “selling” and is therefore part of the 61% of a sales rep’s day that isn’t dedicated to closing deals.
Fortunately, technology can help solve this challenge too!
The Solution to the Travel Time Problem
Without travel, your field reps become inside sales associates. Since both positions are crucial to the success of your business, we need to make travel more efficient. Once again, SPOTIO can assist your sales team in this area.
SPOTIO comes with detailed customer mapping tools, which use location data to create visual representations of the specific sales territories your reps cover. The information gleaned from this tool allows outside sellers to plan their routes more strategically and spend more time selling, less time driving.
Here’s how it works:
1. First, field reps input the specific territory they cover into SPOTIO.
2. Then, they drop pins on the specific business they plan to visit that day.
3. Once reps can actually see where each business is on a map, they’re able to design the most efficient travel routes for themselves.
4. Lastly, outside sellers enjoy the fruits of their labor. Teams that use SPOTIO are able to increase sales by as much as 23%. It makes sense. The more efficient your route, the more potential customers you can meet with. And the more potential customers you meet, the more sales opportunities you have.
SPOTIO also allows field reps to easily input information for each business they travel to via a mobile app. Before your meeting, collect prospect information like their name, phone number, and email address and store it in the SPOTIO system. Afterwards, quickly record the result of your conversation: interested, not interested, or sale made.
All in all, SPOTIO has been proven to save sales reps between one and three hours a day, making it your ideal partner when attempting to help your field reps reach their full potential.
3. CRM Upkeep
You’ve just finished a long day in the field, meeting customers, selling products. When you finally make it back to the office, the last thing you want to do is sit down at your computer for an hour and update your CRM with all the new customer information you gleaned that day.
This is the third common challenge that field reps face on a daily basis. They’re forced to choose between working overtime and cutting back on sales meetings.
CRM software is vital to high performing sales teams. Without it, developing effective sales strategies is almost impossible. But keeping a CRM up-to-date is tedious and takes away from revenue generating activities like meeting with customers.
Your outside sellers need a solution to this problem in order for them to reach their full potential.
The Solution to the CRM Upkeep Problem
Company management needs well-kept CRM records to properly plan. But sales reps hate updating CRM software because it directly affects the number of prospects they can meet with in a day. What’s the solution?
A mobile CRM software that field reps can quickly update in between sales meetings.
SPOTIO can be accessed on the smartphones that your sales associates already have in their pockets. This is important because it means your company doesn’t have to spend money on additional hardware. Plus, your team is already familiar with their own devices, which will ensure they actually use them for CRM purposes.
When your sales reps can quickly update your CRM software from the convenience of their mobile devices, they’ll save time and your database will be more accurate.
Empower Your Field Reps
The average salesperson spends more than half of their time on administrative tasks. While necessary, these tasks greatly affect the number of sales a field rep is able to make.
Fortunately, by using a proven technology tool like SPOTIO, outside sellers can streamline their prospecting efforts, cut down on travel time, and quickly update company CRMs from their mobile devices. By doing so, they’ll become much more efficient and will close more deals.
For an in-depth look at SPOTIO, book a free demo today. One of our knowledgeable team members will be happy to show you the tool’s many features and help you determine if it’s the right solution for your field sales team.
___________
SPOTIO is the #1 field sales engagement platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.
