Background: The sales team of any organisation plays a vital role in its growth and business generation. In his previous article Piyush Nagar shed light on pioneering Indian women in science. Here he explains how to analyse and track salesforce activities with automation.
 
If you are in a client or customer-centric business, which requires meetings, demos, presentation, training, installation, etc, you must have got a sales or ground team to take care of these tasks, because all these tasks often need doorstep solutions.
 
But, when the team is on the field, how can you make sure you have the legitimate records submitted by your field salesforce about their daily visits, the number of meetings, discussion, expenses or ground activities? Well, this is the prime loophole that affects business growth and can decide the inclination of the business balance sheet as well.
 
In this article, we are going to elaborate on some of the proven ways, tools, and strategies, you can use to monitor and track your ground team for unmatched efficiency. You can also analyse their work, get reports, and share suggestions in between a meeting, even if they are at a remote location.

Also read: Do you have what it takes to be a sales shark?

Why the need to monitor field sales force?

It has been observed, sometimes, that ground-sales team or field salesforce does not report their specific activities data. Whether it is meetings, their visits, current location, total journey travelled, expenses, the status of meetings, projected closing, etc have either some ambiguity or do not match with reality. And, when this happens, it negatively impacts sales and business growth of an organisation.

Many sales and marketing persons still use old-fashioned ways of data storage like excel, spreadsheets, or doc. Or, do report on WhatsApp, mobile or email. And, when reports are shared through these dynamic platforms, there are severe chances of errors to happen. And, when any mistake occurs, it becomes hard to track and resolve it.

Field salesforce can’t be replaced but can be optimised to a great extent with automation. Automation makes tasks simple, quick and easy to execute, thus helping you increase business performance and efficiency.

 
Also, reporting on weekend or month-end with these files make it tough to compile, analyse and monitor the performance of the field salesforce. It also makes it difficult to suggest the right tactics and strategies team should follow for business betterment. Sometimes, fake entries and bills have been noticed by the management as well, which is extra expenses an organisation has to bear.

These loopholes are often not seen by the top management and when it comes into the light, its already too late. Apart from this, when the data is not accurate, it becomes harder to figure out which factor is affecting sales, and which not. You can’t analyse the exact sales-cycle and if you do, you will be having wrong or incorrect data.

 
Thus, field salesforce monitoring has become an integral part of sales and marketing activities these days. Customer-centric businesses are sincerely looking for such options to optimise their market-grip with enhanced field salesforce capabilities. With the technological advancements, you can minimise such errors, and fix them as soon as possible. You can also detect and avoid any further scope of such mistakes.

How to do field salesforce monitoring with automation?

How you can monitor the ground activities and enhance their performance with automation? That is the overall theme of this entire article and your business. Well, there are some proven manual and automation solutions, you can go with to dramatically increase your field salesforce’s output.
 
1. You can have a robust automation tool or an efficient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to take care of ground attendance of your field team along with their live location of sign-in. It helps you to make sure you have accurate details of their login, and your team is actually on the ground and working.
 
2. Automation helps you find the team at a live time. With CRM tools, like CRM Sense, you can locate your particular salesforce or the entire team, and assist them if they need help. You can also see where the same resource was an hour or a day ago or at a particular time, and suggest them the next path or meeting.
 
3. You can also decide on the areas where your team should visit. The geo-fencing feature of CRM automation helps channelise team in the fields to higher potential business areas.
 
4. With automation, you can assign leads to your ground team and track their status as well. Automation saves considerable time of your field team by letting them avoid multiple visits to your office for each meeting status update, collecting leads, seeing and getting reports, and pipeline the next meeting.

5. Field salesforce can share outcomes of a meeting directly to the team or top managers with automation. For example, what was the discussion, is there any further meeting planned; when and where and with what agenda, what is the current inclination of discussion, etc. You need not keep a report or put a reminder for everything. Automation tools like CRM Sense do it quite well. It is how you can maximise the productivity of your ground team.
 
6. You can track the actual location of a team member or the team, and guide them where is the next meeting pilled up or suppose to happen next. They need not ask here and there for address. It saves valuable time and efforts, which helps you close more meetings in a day than before.
 
7. Automation helps to schedule the entire day and prioritize the task among them. There is no need of doing any further pen-paper entries. With automation, you can let your sales team decide and do follow-ups; which is an essential part of any sales and marketing activities.
 
8. With automation, you have a better record of expenses. You can live track and see invoices, tickets, bills, and receipts. You can also reimburse the same immediately for continuous movement of your field salesforce. Automation also helps you avoid fake entries and statements. Isn’t this saving which previously you were spending without any reason?
 
9. Want to add notes in between the discussion or a meeting? Well, have it done with an automation tool like CRM Sense.
 
10. Mark and updates your leads on the ground with live location, and be ready for the next challenging assignment. It is how automation makes your task not only comfortable but productive and super easy. It certainly adds value to your ground staff’s working skills.
 
11. Field salesforce can report an issue or a problem faced by then while their ground activities. It helps them to connect with you immediately and get a response in real-time. It gives them a sense of satisfaction and confidence, as well, if they suddenly trapped in any problem
 
12. Want to see reports or analyse the performance of the team, of a week, day or month- you have got automation for this With just a touch or a simple click, and you can see reports quickly.
 
Automation truly face-lifts your current sales and marketing cycle on the ground and boost your performance, thus increasing sales, profit, and net revenue.
 
CRM Sense is an Artificial Intelligence-powered brilliant client relationship management tool. CRM sense has all the above automation-features which your ground salesforce needs to perform maximum with the same resources and time. This tool is secured by cloud-based architecture, which helps you communicate and share information, securely and seamlessly to avoid any errors as well.

Also read: Automation: Impact on SMEs & society

What are the benefits of ground salesforce monitoring?

Monitoring not only helps you find errors and issues associated with field salesforce but also fix them and increase output.

Here are some of the benefits you are going to have post automation implementation for field salesforce (tracking and monitoring)

• You can avoid fake entries or entries with errors
• Track team location, live
• Assist team on the ground if any issue or query comes
• Live expense management and their reimbursement for uninterrupted field salesforce activities
• Find and locate the areas with the highest and weakest business generation potential
• Live attendance management of ground salesforce
• Better channelise resources for optimum performance
• Assign and work upon the leads as quickly as possible
• Meetings and visits were never so much easy, like now with automation.
• Generate report and do a quick analysis
• Reduce operation costs and perform more tasks than now in the same budget, etc.

Conclusion

Field salesforce can’t be replaced but can be optimised to a great extent with automation. Automation makes tasks simple, quick and easy to execute, thus helping you increase business performance. You can improve your business efficiency in terms of field salesforce, and get it done real quick. Apart from it, you can reduce unnecessary expenses and fix the loopholes to avoid any further money drainage. If you are looking to revamp your salesforce or have queries with regards to CRM Sense, do connect with me.

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