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7 steps to increase productivity of your sales force by over 70%
by Lalit Bhise
For the past 2.5 years, we have managed to improve productivity by at least 70% across more than 100 organisations. This experience has been scintillating especially when we see real benefits derived from the Feet on Street workforce and the organisations who hire them.
We also measure/ refine the business steps the organisations take to reach/surpass that level of productivity gain and we have almost made a science out of productivity gain resulting in actual sales increase for the organisation.
So what are these steps?
Step 1: Hygienic customer information through automation
This is a critical step and foundation for the entire automation exercise.
Bizom‘s mobile-based automation gives you complete visibility of your customer’s information along with geo-tagging their location.
This data is sacrosanct and the hygiene of this information drives further productivity increase, especially through superior actionable insights and analytics.
Timeline from the start of automation : 0-1 month
Productivity increase achieved by this step: 0%
Step 2: Automation of daily reporting for field force
Typically companies stop at automation. We believe, that this is just step 2. All the daily work and reporting done by the field force should be automated using digital media.
For example, Bizom mobile application allows you to plan your routine, and capture all sale-related activities, orders, collections and pretty much everything related to the daily reporting of the sales team including their claims.
At this step, we request companies only monitor compliance and correctness of data. At this level, no additional monitoring or policing should be implemented so the sales team feels comfortable with automation and can enjoy the simplification of their job.
Timeline from the start of automation: 1-3 month
Productivity increase achieved by this step: 30% due to saving time for the sales team in daily reporting
Step 3: Intelligent field force through better information
We strongly believe that any automation but especially sales force automation should be done bottom up to get buy-in from the entire team.
This means the first beneficiary of the automation should be front-line feet on the street sales force.
The focus at this step should be to provide information and analytics at the point of sales to the sales team to make the right tactical decisions.
For example, Bizom provides directions to reach customers, historical information about activities done by customers in past, current promos, schemes or discounts in effect, focus products, and collateral like Videos, presentations and other materials which would be interesting to customers. We have even made Bizom intelligent enough to predict and suggest orders to sales executives.
Timeline from the start of automation: 1-3 months
Productivity increase achieved by this step: 20% due to better and more effective sale
Step 4: Actionable alerts & insights to middle management to win tactical battles
This is the only step which involves monitoring. Now that we have made our sales force intelligent, this is the time to give tools to middle management to monitor their team and customers more effectively.
For example, Bizom provides teams with a map view of their field force activities. It also gives simple traffic light dashboards to make correct tactical decisions based on current tactical parameters like total calls in a day, productive calls, etc.
The biggest results we have seen though are from alerts !! Our alert modules send notifications, sms messages or emails to middle management automatically basis pre-defined anomalies found in working. This is by far the best tool we have seen for middle management to control market working and increase their span of control
Timeline from the start of automation : 3-6 months
Productivity increase achieved by this step: 15% due to effective monitoring of tactical activities
Step 5: Dashboards and reports for Top management
Now our bottom-up automation is complete with the right data and right working in the entire sales team. Now is the time for top management to do strategic course correction using the insights all the sales data provides you.
For example, Bizom provides insights like geographic, and channel partner-wise scheme spending. It also gives you a view into category wise channel wise sales/effectivity of your sales force so you can do better product distribution and demand planning. It also allows you to control spending through a transparent and fast claims system.
Timeline from the start of automation: 6-12 months
Productivity increase achieved by this step: 10% due to real-time strategic alignment in sync with market changes.
Step 6: Improve the morale of the team
After step 5 conventional automation of the sales team is complete. Now is the time to be a bit unconventional. We have seen with Bizom that gamification of the sales process makes it fun for the sales team to use automation and be more productive.
In one of our customer, this step alone increased productivity by 200% but step 1-5 are absolutely crucial to be able to design and execute a game in your team correctly.
Along with gamification, it’s a must to make the game interactive so everyone in the sales team can exchange views and have overall fun !
Timeline from the start of automation: 12-15 months
Productivity increase achieved by this step: Varies depending on the game and the business. Typically more than 20%
Step 7: Measure BTL effectiveness through innovation
Most of our customers faced a problem in tracking effectivity of their BTL trade marketing activities. That’s when we invented our “patent pending” algorithm 35hawk.
35hawk is an artificial intelligence image recognition algorithm which can find patterns of interest in pictures taken by field forces in the market using their mobile devices. This we use to provide geographic heat-maps of your brand visibility vis-a-vis competitor brand visibility. 35hawk effectively provides you with real-time insight into your brand penetration in your entire retail universe !!
Timeline from the start of automation: 12-15 months
Productivity increase achieved by this step: Varies depending on the trade marketing strategy typically more than 50%
You may have noticed that these 7 steps would actually increase productivity by even more than 70% … If you need help in your organisation to achieve this, please contact me at lalit at mobisy dot com.
Bizom comes with RoI-based pricing, you know 🙂
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