The role of field sales in a digital world
The changing landscape of Field Sales
Today’s sales arena is experiencing rapid digital disruption, redefining efficiency and intelligence. While virtual meetings, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, virtual deal rooms, and revenue intelligence platforms are dramatically reshaping sales, the heartbeat of many organisations — field sales — hasn’t changed much in decades. The modern sales tool kit relies on virtual interactions to be effective. However, there’s still a large number of companies that rely on face-to-face meetings to sell their goods and build lasting relationships.
The Challenges of Field Sales
Companies that provide physical goods or highly complex services such as machinery, tools, construction, or other supplies still rely on live presentations of their goods and need to understand the customers' requirements on-site. Sellers in this environment are required to leave the office and work in the field, which brings its own set of operational challenges:
On-the-Go Sales
They are on the go for vast parts of their week, spending hours driving or traveling to customer sites, resulting in time lost for productive work.
On-Site Client Meetings
Client meetings take place on-site, often in the production plant or coffee kitchen, making it virtually impossible to document these interactions without either losing track of the discussion or disrupting the intimacy of the meeting.
Reliance on Portable Devices
They rely on portable devices to interact with their workplace. However, only a minority of the modern tool stack is accessible for hands-free interaction, forcing sellers to perform administrative tasks in their evening free time.
The Field Sales Dilemma
Companies that ignore these challenges are putting themselves at a significant competitive disadvantage. Having spoken to hundreds of field sales teams across different industries, geographies and sizes, we have identified an overarching triad of operational issues every field sales team faces:
Inefficient field operations
Investing into field sales means investing in personal and long-lasting customer relationships. However, on average sellers spend only 28% of their time actively selling throughout the day. This is largely due to the inaccessibility of their digital systems landscape throughout the day. Completing administrative tasks is cumbersome and time-consuming, especially when management demands high documentation requirements. The result is less time to sell, less personalised customer service and poor data quality.
Missed revenue opportunities
At the same time, field sales are the direct sensors into the market and the best resource to inform strategic decision making. Yet sales leaders struggle to make data-driven decisions because the field operations remain opaque. Customer interactions are poorly documented, if at all, and there aren’t enough resources to evaluate them at scale. As a result, competitive moves and market trends are missed, sales initiatives are delayed, and emerging opportunities are identified too late.
Delayed downstream processes
Disconnected from their organisation throughout the day, field sales reps typically push their administrative tasks out to the end of the day - or worse, to the end of the week. This delay in information transfer causes delays in the follow-up processes required to move the deal forward. As important details are forgotten, the quality of the documentation is further compromised. This leads to more cycles between inside and field sales, binding precious time for real work like writing offers or answering customer calls. As a result, sales cycles lengthen, and customer relationships suffer.
This dilemma of needing high quality field data to support decision making, while at the same time optimising the active selling time of reps, requires a tool that works seamlessly in the field, yet provides structured data for analysis.
Leverage Speech Technology and AI
VoiceLine combines the latest speech technology with artificial intelligence to seamlessly capture comprehensive data in the field, then automatically extract and cluster key insights for sales management.
With just a press of a button on their mobile phone, salespeople can record interactions by voice and use AI to convert them into follow-up processes in the CRM in seconds. All recorded information is stored in a data lake and evaluated by AI in regular market analyses to highlight opportunities and risks for sales management.
Plug & Play. Secure.
VoiceLine works plug and play with all major CRM systems, without any IT project.
VoiceLine also meets compliance and security standards for enterprise deployments: GDPR Compliant, SOC2, Frankfurt server location, Microsoft Azure Cloud, ISO 27001.
Get value from day one
VoiceLine typically pays for itself in less than a week. With just 10 visits per week, each sales representative gains up to 5 hours of additional sales time and can document up to 80% faster.
AI clusters and highlights opportunities and risks from day one. It only takes a handful of customer interactions for sales management to respond to new revenue opportunities, market trends and competitive movements.
