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.”

When I first started working in sales, I found picking up the phone pretty daunting so I’ve always admired the folks who head out into the trade and try to sell in person! 

Since I’ve been with Bowimi, I’ve become friends with some amazing field sales reps, so I asked them what it takes to be a high performing sales rep. (PS If you’re looking to hire and train reps, we have a guide all about that here.)

Be organised 

If you say you’ll bring samples on Tuesday, bring samples on Tuesday. If you drop the ball and don’t keep your promises it doesn’t just reflect badly on you, it reflects badly on the brand. One venue I know refuses to buy from a particular brewery simply because one of their reps was unreliable years ago when the manager was at a different pub! 

You’ll also want to ring ahead to make sure people are expecting you, especially when it’s a second or third meeting. This maximises your chances of sitting down with the right person and having a productive conversation. 

Max Jones from Perfect Ted makes a plan for busy periods, like lunchtime, and goes in just beforehand so he isn’t interrupting people and can get his products looking presentable before the rush. 

Be friendly. 

People buy from people, not companies; so take the time to introduce yourself and get to know the people you’re selling to. George Demetriou from Longshot, likes to start with a handshake and introduction, compliment their shop and ask more about their business. 

Think about how you can help their business: you’re not the only salesperson they’ll have seen this week, so be empathetic and  bring something unique to the table.

Even if you don’t see the person you need to, you’re wasting your time if you don’t at least say hello to the staff and gain some information that you can deploy later on in the process. 

Be creative

Where you’ll really win is by collaborating with locations. Do whatever it takes to breathe the location, understand what makes it unique and what their customers will be delighted by. 

Where are the best places to put your brand so that end customers’ eyes land on your product first? Is it fridge placement, menus or staff recommendations that will sell your product in store? 

Do you need to sit in a deli for the entire lunch hour to see how customers move through the location? Make a note of which shelves and products so you can place yourself in the best places for that venue.

Lastly…

Don’t fret too much. There aren’t any super slick tricks or shortcuts to being successful in this role. Will Cary from Living Things Soda says “the real challenge is just turning up, being consistent, and seeing things through, admittedly this is harder than it sounds sometimes.”

Making a hire in field sales is a make or break moment for any brand, and there are 2 points of failure: hiring the wrong person, or not hiring fast enough and missing a busy season. Here we’ll walk through a speedy, modern and empathetic hiring process to get this position filled ASAP. 

Great job descriptions

This position isn’t worth going through recruiters for so we’re going to have to write the job advert ourselves. 

A good starting point is to look at other field sales jobs that are being advertised and collect ones that you really like, and ones that you really dislike. Figure out why you’ve picked these, and let the reasoning guide you on how to write your own. 

Your job description shouldn’t be a snooze-fest.I mean, your brand isn’t boring and vague so why would your job listing be? 

Once you’re done, try and circulate this with some friends who aren’t in the FMCG space and ask for their advice. This will help you weed out some of the esoteric language that may have crept into your writing, and would put people off because they don’t understand some aspects of your advert. 

Build an amazing candidate information pack

A candidate information pack is what you’ll give people after they’ve passed screening. The aim of this is to give your candidates the best chance of securing the job and to get them excited about the prospect of working with you. 

This should include:

• The structure of the team they’ll be working in. Who’s their manager, who are their peers going to be? Are there plans to grow or change the team over the next 12 months?

• What the team works on. Is it finding new stockists, increasing volume, helping with activations, finding new territories or genre of venue to sell into?

• Their contribution to the business. Tell them why this role matters, why you decided to hire for it and how they can make a real difference to the organisation.

• Where field sales reps progress within the business/industry. When looking for more junior roles, people are concerned about how it narrows down their careers later down the line. It’s important to point to people like heads of sales, grocery buyers and other aspirational roles and show them their career paths from being a field sales representative. 

• What the interviews will be about, and how to succeed in them. 

Revealing interview questions

When we’re speaking with people who have little work experience, we can’t ask them for examples of how they’ve done things in the past. The point of these interview questions is to understand their mindset and attitude, plus how good they are at talking to strangers (as that’s the critical part of their job). 

• What makes this brand special?

• Who are the target customers for this brand?

• What do you like about field sales? 

• Can you describe a time when you’ve chosen a brand that you haven’t tried before, and what led you to that choice. 

• Tell me about a time when you’ve had to overcome a challenge on the spot.

Always leave things on a positive note 

No matter the outcome, make sure to send your candidates off with a smile. Even if they don’t join you, leave them feeling pumped about your brand. 

Ask other employees what a great “no” looks like when they’ve been job hunting. This is critically important, because this could turn the unsuccessful candidate into a superfan or a net detractor. 

Replying with something like “We really liked you personally, and we thoroughly enjoyed meeting you throughout the interview process. However, there was another candidate who was less hesitant around answering difficult questions about our product and so we’ve chosen to go with them this time. That being said, you will be a great addition to whichever team you end up joining.” 

Are you hiring right now? Why not download our guide on how to hire and train field sales reps?

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a database where a company will keep track of their leads and customers, CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Manager”. CRMs are used to store contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers, notes about meetings and calls that have taken place 

Here’s a list of popular CRMs 

• Hubspot 

• Pipedrive 

• Salesforce

• Zoho

• SugarCRM

• Capsule 

These CRMs are great tools to help you track your sales and marketing activities. They work especially well when you’re sitting at a desk, selling to other people who are sitting at a desk; and your primary communication channels are through email, phone calls, and instant messages. 

CRMs are organised by types of objects. Typically, these consist of Contacts, Companies, Deals and Campaigns. Contacts are nested under companies, with Deals associating the other three. This is so you can find all correspondence from one person who’s involved in a deal, and you can track which deals were generated per campaign. 

What is a field sales platform?

Field sales apps offer a great alternative to CRMs for teams who conduct their business face to face. 

Traditional CRMs work brilliantly when selling to people via email, telephone calls and instant messaging but a field sales app helps you track sales activities that take place in person. 

While field sales platforms will also have objects such as contacts and companies, they mostly revolve around locations rather than companies. Many also include route planning functionality, so that Field Sales Reps can better plan their days. 

Here’s a list of popular Field Sales Platforms

• Bowimi 

• Aforza

• Skynamo 

• Badger Maps 

• Repsly

Field sales apps often have functionality to make note of phone calls, emails and other communications, but treat these as secondary to visits. 

Want to see what a field sales platform looks like in action? Book a demo of Bowimi here.

Could I have both?

In companies where you have a mix of ‘desk’ selling and field sales, you should consider using both. 

For example, a snack brand might have a field sales platform to make sure their supermarket listings are compliant and also use a CRM to track their activities around getting into a new account. 

However, don’t use the wrong tool for the job. Trying to track email outreach or phone calls with a field sales app will prove harder than using a CRM that has features for recording these built in. If doing a phone call or a drop in visit is a rare occurrence you may find it easier to record these as notes/free text in your current platform rather than onboard a brand new platform. 

There’s a niche, un-sexy intersection between brand field sales reps and their wholesalers, which no tech startups have ever shown an interest in.

Traditionally, if you visit a store and want to help them order your product through their wholesaler, it’d be a tedious, manual task of typing out an email with all the relevant info and a lot of back-and-forth. This was the accepted way of doing things until I developed a mild obsession with improving the way wholesale transfer orders worked.

18 months ago, we launched the only product in the world (believe me, I’ve looked) which makes wholesale transfer orders a breeze. A single place where a brand can manage all of their wholesalers, product listings, prices and info. Plus, a simple interface to allow even the most in-experienced student to walk into any store and send an order to any wholesaler.

This week, we released a bunch of new features to further disrupt the way brands do wholesale transfer orders:

• Order statuses – it’s now possible to update the statuses of all the orders you’re putting through so you can keep track of which ones have been delivered and which haven’t.

• Wholesaler status update – your wholesaler can now click a link in the transfer order email and update the status of your order for you.

• Order comments and mentions – you can now leave comments on order activity to celebrate wins, ask a colleague for more info, or post updates.

• Historic orders – you walk into a shop and find out they already stock your product. Now you can record the fact that they ordered 4 cases of SKU X from Wholesaler Y, 5 months ago. Crucial when it comes to building accurate customer profiles.

• Customer / Distributor / Manager (internal) notes – from one page in our app, you can now generate three personalised emails in one click. You can specifically tailor notes for each party to make the whole ordering experience much more enjoyable and productive for everyone.

The secret to being successful in wholesale is building good relationships. Most brands aspire to win big, national wholesale listings, but it’s the regional (often cash-on-delivery) wholesalers who’ll be most willing to work with you. Investing early in these relationships, understanding their businesses and helping wherever you can will pay off in the long run.

Whether you already have reps supporting wholesale accounts or are interested in finding out how to put these processes in place, feel free to reach out if you’d like to see how you could use Bowimi.