How to Improve the Productivity of Your Field Force: Finding an Automated Solution
Working in the field may bring freedom to reps selling consumer packaged goods, but it can also lead to disorganization if not careful. The CPG industry involves multiple offline locations and numerous online channels to keep everything properly managed. Part of this comes in tracking sales reps and routes covering various territories.
Without keeping this together, you’re going to create far more errors that could lead to stock maintenance issues, wrong deliveries, or excessive product returns.
The solution is to start using an automation solution for your distribution challenges. However, if you think automation is only relegated to the industrial sector, think again.
Automated features now work in various comprehensive ways. This includes through mobile technology to keep a sharp eye on what’s going on in numerous locations.
Managing All Your Data
With so much data coming in from different places in your CPG career, do you have a way to integrate it so it makes sense? You need something better managing the multiple routes your distributors take to deliver goods. How do you know how effectively you’re distributing your products and how the sales performance is in each store?
Using manual systems, you’d have to use multiple sources to find out this information. Automation helps gather all this data and puts it one place for access at any time.
It’s just the start in what you can do automating the way you manage distributed consumer goods in diverse places.
Helping Your Sales Reps on Retail Execution
The pressure is mostly on your sales reps who have to find the perfect stores willing to carry your products. Automated management programs gather further data reps can read on the best possible store candidates.
Through surveys and audits, they’ll know which store is the perfect fit. It’s an example in how big data consolidates into something useful when allowing automated platforms to guide the selling process.
If your sales reps think automation replaces jobs, you can reassure them it only acts as a digital guide to make their jobs easier.
Automating Direct to Store Deliveries and Field Service
Having automated data available to independent reps helps them better manage their delivery and route sales to avoid errors. One of the risks you take using manual entry systems for things like this is the downtime required to find mistakes.
With this much time wasted, sales reps can lose valuable time, hence making you lose money.
It works the same for field service where automation keeps account of scheduled stock, replenishment, and money owed. Being able to tap into this through a mobile device saves money on phone calls to the head office inquiring about specific data.
Automation for Merchandisers
Along the chain of your field force is the merchandisers who have to entice customers. They need an automation platform as well to manage things like planograms for product placement expertise. Plus, they need something to manage digital displays in-store, or digital imagery placed online.
Most of all, automation collects data on their competitors so they can become more strategic in what they do to make the products sell. Relying on analytics to know what competitors do aids in making smarter decisions to stay ahead of the game.
Automation for Managing Product Returns
Keeping track of all your product returns needs just as much organization. A mobile automation system provides real-time data on what’s being returned and why. Having this information readily available is going to help streamline your distribution strategies to prevent so many returns.
With the entire funnel in distribution consumer packaged goods being a complex one, you can’t afford to do second-guessing anymore on what’s happening out there.
At Ivy Mobility, we’ve created a superior enterprise and mobile software solution to those in the CPG industry. Visit us to find out about our comprehensive features.