Despite the rise of e-commerce, in-person sales continue to play a critical role in the health & wellness industry. Over 80% of consumers still feel more confident purchasing in physical stores, especially for items like health supplements, where product comparison and quality assurance are key concerns (Power Reviews, Mailmodo). Physical retail stores continue to see growth, with 72% of shoppers citing in-store experiences as a major influence on their purchase decisions (Contact Pigeon). Selling to retailers or wholesalers can seem time-consuming compared to digital customer acquisition, especially without the right tools to streamline the process. 

That’s where using the right platform to manage and track your field sales efforts becomes crucial. Bowimi’s field sales software enables your team to handle everything—from prospecting and route planning to conducting surveys and creating follow-up tasks—all through a single app. Our integrations with Google and Zapier make it seamless. Plus, Bowimi integrates with platforms like HubSpot and Xero, providing one unified source of truth for reporting.

Speaking of reporting, all data collected by your field sales team is standardised through in-app surveys and fed into a powerful dashboard, accessible anytime to review team performance and progress. See our platform in action by checking out our video above, or view some of our FAQ’s.

If you want to capture that 22% of in-store shoppers and boost your sales, Bowimi can help. Book a quick demo of our field sales software today by clicking filling in the form below.

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.

Buying software sucks. There’s so much noise out there and we’ve all signed up for products we’ve not used and been tied in for 12 months 😤

Unfortunately for us, CRMs are the worst offender in this category. Teams don’t like them, they rarely get adopted and most CRMs have large set up costs and 12-month contracts so it’s an expensive gamble to take.

So 12 months ago when we entered the market, proving the product was a much bigger priority than dragging unwilling customers through 12 months of regret, so monthly rolling was the standard. No commitment. This put the responsibility on us to deliver value, and fast, so we came up with a process where any business could fully determine within one month whether or not our platform would be worth the monthly investment.

Here’s what your first month on Bowimi looks like:

Day 1 – Set up surveys (data capture), tags (location management) and ordering (if applicable).

Day 2 – Get the whole team set up: Download the app on phones and set passwords so that they can go straight into using Bowimi in the field. We give every team member a tour of all the relevant features, plus our contact details for peace of mind. They’ll have full access to our:

• Prospecting tool to find local businesses
• Route planning and optimisation to save time and money
• Task management to keep track of follow ups
• Surveys to record photos and other key information from visits
• Orders to create wholesale transfer and direct orders in seconds

Day 7 – Insights: Once you’ve had a week of using Bowimi in the field, you’ll have some good data to visualise. This is where we build bespoke dashboards for you, showing you exactly the data and metrics you want to see. Once they’re set up, you can access them anytime you want and even get them automatically emailed to you for added convenience.

After the insights session, you’ll now have all the tools in place for your team to work more efficiently and for their managers to have instant access to the most important metrics. Over the remainder of your first month, you’ll be able to clearly see whether or not the platform is working for you and making a real difference to your business. If it’s not, cancel. No strings attached.

The saying goes: “No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole” and this couldn’t be more true when it comes to field sales software. Whilst you might think you’re shopping for software, what you actually need is a process that works for you and a tool that your team enjoy using.

For more information on how to get started, email me on dan@october2025.bowimi.com

When you hear the word “automation”, you’d be forgiven for thinking about robots stealing our jobs and a dystopian future where a handful of pale, eccentric billionaires own armies of mechanical workers whilst the rest of us live out our days in the metaverse.

Whilst I can’t predict the future, I’m here to paint a brighter picture of how field sales teams can easily implement automations to save them hours every week and make them more productive than they ever imagined.

In 2011, three guys in Missouri created Zapier, a product which would go on change the way hundreds of thousands of businesses work. Zapier allows you to connect the platforms you use everyday via “Zaps” to automate your workflows and save you time. A “trigger” in one platform, causes an “action” in another and with over 4000 integrations, the opportunities are endless.

For the past decade, a growing community of people have been obsessively building zaps to automate their workflows, drive efficiency and grow their businesses. I have no doubt, that among the talented individuals who use our platform daily at leading challenger brands, that we’ll see some extraordinary creativity in the automations they create.

In wholesale, for example, brand reps visit shops with the intention of introducing them to their products and putting a wholesale transfer order through one of their wholesale partners. After each visit, they could be interested in sending a follow up email (perhaps using Zapier’s delay feature). Brands in grocery may want to automatically save photos of displays from store visits to shared Google Drive accounts. Manually updating spreadsheets could soon become a thing of the past and any repetitive processes which happen at any point in your sales processes could soon be turned into a zap.

At Bowimi, building a Zapier integration isn’t a tick-box exercise on our product backlog, it’s an opportunity for us to make our platform infinitely more useful and extendable. The best part? You get to spend more time selling and on high-value tasks, and less time on repetitive tasks.

Here’s how you get started: https://bowimi.notion.site/Automation-with-Zapier-b3838699564948df90ac1378702935ce

Running a challenger food and drink brand can be difficult on the best of days. After a year of working with dozens of leading and early-stage challenger brands, I’ve come across a number of products and services that I feel make a real impact.

For any brand with grocery accounts, Elm is quickly establishing itself as an absolute necessity. Elm takes all of your data across grocery, e-commerce and wholesale, and gives you actionable, easy-to-digest insights. Some brands use these insights to direct their student brand ambassador store visits on Bowimi, others use external agencies.

For brands (particularly craft beer brands) who want to offer direct sales to stockists, Sellar is proving to be an incredibly useful tool. Sellar gives brands an online trade store and automates most of the tasks involved in placing and managing direct sales for both the buyers and suppliers.

Every brand that wants to win new stockists or action grocery store issues, needs field activity, either in-house or agency, which is why this article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Bowimi. Take Elm for example, if you get 100 “stock no sales” alerts per week for Sainsbury’s stores across London, Bowimi will be the most cost-effective way for you to manage (and own the data from) the in-house or agency activity that you carry out. If you’ve invested in Sellar to manage your direct sales, Bowimi will make your team much more effective when prospecting, planning routes, tasks, customer visits and placing orders (wholesale and direct).

For any brand with grocery accounts, direct trade and field sales, combining Elm, Sellar and Bowimi would deliver efficiency improvements that large brands like Coca-Cola or Heineken would have spent millions of pounds to achieve. With every innovation, it’s becoming easier and easier for challenger brands to achieve more, in a cost-effective way which wasn’t possible even 3 years ago.

Beyond sales and growth platforms, there’s a wealth of resources available out there in the form of podcasts, programmes and other support. My favourite podcast in this space is Brand Growth Heroes by Fiona Fitz. Fiona uses her podcasts to dive deep into how leading challenger brands achieved their success in often unconventional ways, her guests have included the founders of Tenzing, MOJU, Dash Water, Lucky Saint, and TRIBE.

In summary, if you’ve got grocery accounts: buy Elm. If you’re doing direct sales: buy Sellar and if you’re doing field sales or grocery visits: buy Bowimi. All three are UK-based, early-stage startups where the founders will work tirelessly to deliver extraordinary results for your business.