The emergence of store merchandising platform solutions has eased the lives of category managers with digital data collection, but still, they have to deal with many solutions not meant for the specific purpose of tracking on-shelf availability at stores.
Sales people in general hate supervision. As a career that requires an independent personality from professionals, outside sales attracts people that are naturally wary of extra supervision. So how come outside sales teams tend to love working with a field marketing app that features GPS tracking?
A lot has been said about how brick-and-mortar retailers are losing ground to Internet sales. However, research – and revenue – has shown that some physical stores and brands within these stores still can maintain a competitive advantage.
Sales managers live in a delicate balance: Do they behave as “helicopter bosses”, demanding constant updates from field reps or do let them “do their thing” and risk losing oversight of their team activities?
Holidays, as a shopping-intensive season, are prime time for retail and, with the competition from online alternatives, in-store presentation of products must be at its best so shoppers are enticed to stay and spend at the store. But how can marketing and merchandising managers know that the holiday displays they developed are being consistently implemented and remain in good condition even after weeks of intensive use?
Store checklists are notorious for being difficult to plan, implement and report on, especially when the retail inspection encompasses several SKUs across multiple categories. Not only it is time and labor-intensive, but the data processing as a whole – from collection to transcription – is extremely prone to human error.
Supervising outside staff and field reps is one of the hardest parts of a manager’s job description, just because there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the activities being performed by the team members throughout the day. That is the main reason many companies are implementing solutions for field marketing. Through mobile technology, smartphones and tablets have become an essential tool for outside teams. But what are the main benefits of a solution for field marketing?
With a mobile merchandising app, smartphones and tablets not only replace the old pen-and-paper method – virtually eliminating cumbersome data transcription – but also become de-facto merchandising auditing tools that provide managers real time access to retail planogram compliance check results.
Calculating retail merchandising metrics such as product, category, and store KPIs is an essential part of many businesses, from large CPG companies to supermarket and drugstore chains. However, collecting the source data beyond what is supplied by cash registers can be incredibly complex, since it might involve ground teams with dozens or even hundreds of people.
One of the main concerns of field sales managers is the little oversight they have of their reps’ activities throughout the workday. For this reason, many businesses have been adopting field sales management apps as a way to increase rep accountability as well as mentoring tools. By knowing what is going on in the field, managers can identify areas of opportunity and properly coach their teams.
