Answer: Stronger connections.

Your brand sells to people! From wholesale to on-trade and off-trade, and through your field sales teams selling in-person, there’s a whole community of individuals between you and your end consumer. This is why building a strong community is so vital for FMCG brands, with the right field sales software.

In this article, we’ll be diving into the importance of network and community for FMCG brands with field sales, as well as findings from the ‘Kindred Spirits’ survey, and highlighting the benefits of celebrating the industry together.

Earlier this week, Bowimi joined over 250 drinks brands at The Duppy Share‘s ‘Kindred Spirits’ event. This incredible community of challenger Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) drinks brands was born from a shared need for support, and it’s blossomed into a vibrant network where businesses come together to share insights, news, and advice.

Bowimi’s field sales software is designed to tackle the challenges these brands face—like efficient route planning and prospecting—all in one place. We were thrilled to join the group last year, helping brands accelerate their field sales with our dynamic platform.

‘Kindred Spirits’ Survey Insights

The evening was packed with insights, with CGA sharing an insightful survey conducted with attendees prior to the event on the current climate for FMCG brands. It explored the current landscape for FMCG brands, looking at growth expectations, trend predictions, and perceptions of wider socioeconomic factors (yes, we’re still looking at you, Brexit).

This was a unique opportunity for drinks businesses of all sizes, along with marketing, PR, recruitment, and manufacturing companies, to learn about the priorities of challenger drinks brands for 2025 and their key investment plans. Here are some of the standout insights:

• Trading conditions continue to pose challenges for challenger drinks brands
• Concerns centre on the economy, listings, and costs, with 42% of businesses worried about a lack of on-premise listing opportunities and increased supply costs.
• Exports are a top priority for 2024, with over half (58%) of respondents reporting growth plans.
• Teams, while small, are on the rise! 64% of businesses expect to expand their teams over the next 12 months by an average of 4.5 people.
• While gin demand is dipping as customers explore new tastes, ready-to-drink options, tequila, and rum are thriving. Many suppliers are diversifying their ranges to avoid relying on a single SKU (stock-keeping unit).
• Marketing spend is set to soar by 73% in the next year, with traditional methods like consumer events, email campaigns, and price-led promotions remaining favourites.
• Brands may face hurdles in reaching their funding goals for growth, new hires, and marketing. Fifty-three percent plan to raise new capital in the next year, which means 100 brands will be vying for a relatively small pool of angel investors in the FMCG sector. Given high interest rates and constrained capital, raising funds may take longer than expected.

 ‘Kindred Spirits’ Awards

Part of the night was dedicated to an awards evening celebrating the FMCG drinks brands that are a part of the ‘Kindred Spirits’ group. Bowimi has been at the forefront of enabling indie drinks brands, from breweries to no-low, to grow rapidly through our high performance field sales software, so when we had the opportunity to sponsor the award for ‘Best Overall Indie Brand’ we knew what we had to do.

Bowimi is used by both large and independent businesses to streamline their field sales efforts, helping them secure new listings and review sales rates across different locations. Our platform gives brand team members instant access to ‘nearby’ prospecting, ensuring every location—whether pre-planned with our route planning feature or discovered on the go—can be enhanced with detailed surveys, creating a powerful, automated dashboard for managers to review. By saving field sales representatives an average of four days a month, we truly make a difference for indie FMCG businesses!

With our Co-Founder Dom Bowcock taking to the stage to announce the winner for the final award of the evening, with the coveted prize of 1000 free listings of cocktail bars on the cards, it was all to play for for those shortlisted. It was Botivo in the end that walked away with the award, and the listings, for their scaling of their alcohol free apertivo. As they’re already customers of our platform, we know those listings will be put to incredible use in their growth plan to become an iconic name on the back shelf.

The shortcut FMCG field sales need to know

Just like ‘Kindred Spirits’ brings a community of challenger drinks brands together to elevate them, a crucial part of growing your FMCG brand or product is getting it into the right listings. But how can your teams avoid wasting time on venues that aren’t the right fit for your product and instead discover tailored opportunities to accelerate your brand presence and sales?

Book your free demo of the Bowimi platform with one of our experts through the calendar below! We’ll walk you through how our easy-to-use field sales software can streamline your sales, listing management, and reporting, helping your business to achieve your goals faster.

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.