Starting your own field team can be daunting. Whether it’s a new product or you’re looking to make a splash in a new vertical or region, deciding whether to start hiring your own team, or outsourcing it to an agency is a decision that could make or break your project.

Last week, I wrote about why you should build your own field team, but this week (and to appease some of my friends) I’m going to hop over the fence and go through the merits of outsourcing this work to an agency. 

You have a very specific mission

For startup brands, the dream is to begin small and scale up over time, however if you have an ambitious goal that requires boots on the ground next week you just won’t have time to interview a small army and educate them all on what they’re selling. 

If you want to be in every gym in the North-East or every bottle shop in Edinburgh, then you’re going to need a massive existing field team, or a field sales agency. 

For brands that are launching in grocery, you can use field sales agencies to check compliance at supermarkets at a faster rate than a small-medium sized field team. Furthermore, you can pay on a per-project basis.

Lee Gray from Strictly Sales & Marketing says you should go with a field sales agency because they’re “pulling on decades of knowledge and relationships we can deliver quicker results than building a team from scratch”. 

The power of relationships

A benefit of having your own team is that you will come to own relationships with decision makers, but on the flipside most agencies and their reps will have much longer and deeper relationships with new stockists. Besides this they’ll also be able to pull from their expertise to instinctively take your product into the stockists who suit your product best. 

It really depends whether you want to build a lasting relationship, or rent a really good one. 

This makes the average quality of the visits much higher. Agency reps can also visit many more locations in a day because they’re not having to build the relationships from scratch. 

Agencies have huge dexterity

“The advantages of using an agency is we are experts at all facets of the industry, whether it be POS, Sales or Merchandising”, says James Bullen from Instore. 

It’s true, if you’ve decided that your drink can do well in the off-trade then your sales team, who’s used to selling to the on-trade will have to learn a whole new kettle of tricks. Luckily, with the agency model you’ll be able to deploy the specialists that your product needs at this moment in time. 

When should you use an agency?

Agencies work when you’ve got a specific mission that’s got a clear return on investment. They’re not going to be the one-stop-shop for brand growth (there’s no silver bullet, remember) – and if you’re looking to find where you fit in the market, hiring a field sales agency could be a convoluted way of going about it. 

However if you’ve found what works for your brand, and you’re willing to invest to scale something that requires a quick hit of boots on the ground, then hiring a field sales agency is a very compelling option.

Starting your own field team can be daunting, and it’s very tempting to sidestep the hassle and find a more plug and play solution like an agency. At Bowimi, I work with brands of all sizes who do it really well themselves, and agencies who can accelerate the growth of a brand or help maintain their position as a leading brand. 

As I’m always on the lookout for new FMCG brands to show Bowimi to, I’ve found they’re often at the point where they’re weighing up building out their own sales team or outsourcing it. 

So, I asked some of my contacts about when you’d want to start your own team and where it might be smart to look at agencies.

You want to scale founder-led sales

Great brands come from their founders pouring themselves into the product, and truly caring about the end product. So, when a founder goes to do sales, they bring all of that passion and expertise to each stockist they speak with.

Founder-led sales are often super effective, and if the conversion rate of these early sales can scale linearly then the business will have a bright future. However this often isn’t just a plug and play with a business just adding four sales people and expecting 4x the output. 

One advantage of building your own team is that you can curate the salespeople and their pitch a lot more closely than you can with an agency. Whoever’s selling it should be able to tell the gritty story and eloquently explain the benefits of the product, and you can handpick those people and train them to do it your way. 

Now, you could spend a lot of time trying to get an agency to go this deep into your product, however they’re usually trying to sell multiple products alongside yours. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the focus all on yours? As Louis Gill, the Sales Manager at Daily Dose, says “How can an external agency be as invested as someone that’s along for the ride?”.

You’ll own and process your data from the field

I normally tell people who are considering joining Bowimi that an underrated benefit of the platform is unlocking the knowledge that usually is either stuck with their reps or is left unexplored. Getting lots of anecdotal and quantitative datapoints from the field can help your team exploit the market better and helps you identify how to drive volume through the trade. 

It goes without saying that you’ll need great technology to fully utilise this (I can show you how Bowimi helps with this, book a time here). 

Although you can instruct an agency to report on specific things, and carry out research on your behalf, when you’ve got your own field team you are better equipped to find weird things and react to them quickly.

For example, Weekend Drinks, found it difficult to get stocked in the off-trade. By getting their reps to pause selling, and start asking why they quickly got to the bottom of the problem. It wasn’t price, quality or branding, it was the size of the bottles. The secret to their quick reaction was having an internal team who were able to investigate what was going wrong and get the answer conveyed quickly. 

Surely there are disadvantages?

While organically growing your own field team has many upsides, you’re going to have a ramp time as you expand it, so it will take a while for the return to come back on the investment. If you want to get 100 salespeople on the ground to take your brand national, you might be better off looking at field sales agencies. 

However, John Morrissey from Vocation Brewery is on the money with this analogy:

“Sometimes it’s necessary for brands to utilise other breweries to brew their beer for a whole variety of good reasons, but we would all prefer to control production from hop to glass to ensure you have the best product possible. The same is true for Field Sales, your sales teams may be the first ever interaction with your brand and making the right impact is crucial.”