#fieldactivitymanagement

Your clients are your biggest asset. Without a strong customer base, a business will fall apart. Although acquiring new customers is necessary for business growth, maintaining good relationships with your current customers is just as important. In fact, it costs organizations six to seven times more to attract a new client than it does to retain a current one. Understanding your clients’ needs and being able to meet their demands will give your business a competitive edge.

Managers become extremely frustrated when they have a team of competent field representatives, but lackluster sales and customer satisfaction levels. One explanation for these problems is ineffective or nonexistent territory management. If clients are not properly grouped or if field reps are not properly dispersed amongst clients, customer relationships and the bottom line can suffer. However, with careful planning and consistent analysis, territory management can optimize a field team’s efforts.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the ability to be alert and flexible is a necessity for any company looking to stay a step ahead of the competition. Organizations cannot afford to have agility be an afterthought; an agile company culture needs to be developed through an intentional, disciplined approach. This post will discuss what an agile company culture looks like, as well as some best practices for achieving agility within your organization.

If you are a reader of this blog then you know we spend a lot of time talking about how to make your field teams more efficient and effective, and how to leverage your field resources to provide insights to your business that you can’t get without ‘feet on the street’. It occurred to me while participating in a panel discussion hosed by the World Alliance for Retail Excellence & Standards last week that there may be a lot of questions about how to go about building a Field Marketing/Merchandising team, particularly among entrepreneurs bringing new products to market.  We’ve made the point that great products don’t necessarily sell themselves; consumers have to know about them, be interested in them and be able to find them. You have to support them with marketing outside the store, and probably more importantly inside the store, and you need someone to make sure that your Retail Execution plans are being carried out at the shelf.

For managers and small business owners, innovation and change in an established system are often approached with great trepidation. A fear of changing something that already works has led to many decision-makers falling behind their competition. The reality is that change is necessary in every industry.

In a previous post, we talked about how to solve common concerns field reps have while performing their audits. The easy solution was to make the switch to electronic forms using Field Activity Management (FAM) software. In order to fully maximize the benefits of going paperless on your audit, take these steps: analyze data, know your competition, and perform regular audits. These steps will put you one step ahead of your competition.

Process improvement can be defined as the proactive task of identifying, analyzing, and improving upon existing business processes within an organization for increased optimization. It is an ongoing practice that should always be followed up with analysis of areas for improvement. The results of process improvement can be measured in the enhancement of product quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, increased productivity, development of the skills of employees, efficiency, and increased profit. Field representatives who are enabled with technology solutions that improve efficiency are empowered to support process improvement within their organization.

For small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) with field reps, there has never been a better time to utilize software tools to maximize profits and productivity. A growing number of software companies have emerged on the market with services aimed at growing SMBs, and the trend for integrating them is on the rise. But how do you calculate which software is the best for your SMB? Choosing the right software can be a challenge, as a full implementation could alter your daily activities and more importantly, your bottom line. To make an informed decision make sure you are choosing software that: