Field sales automation software can improve sales reps’ visibility, enhance their productivity, and maximize sales coverage of your business. It also enables sales managers to track sales activities, targets, and leads in real-time.
Field sales reps are crucial to lead conversions, but they often encounter challenges on the ground that limit customer face time, disrupt follow-ups, and lead to inefficient task management. To overcome these hurdles, they need a robust tool that enables both reps and managers to streamline lead actioning and drive higher sales conversions.
The right field sales automation software can help iron out these problems and positively impact the top line.
How to Select the Best Field Sales Automation Software
1. Identify Key Challenges
Your sales reps may face some key challenges when on the field. This can impact their abilities to follow up on leads effectively, reduce customer face time, and ultimately affect the sales performance.
Some common challenges include:
- Inefficient lead management
- Lack of real-time visibility for sales managers
- Poor route planning and territory mapping
- Manual data entry and redundancy
- Limited sales insights
2. Optimize on Feature Selection
In addition to the features that come with the platform, you can check if the platform offers an option to customize features that are more closely aligned with your objectives. You can also do this by speaking to an SME from the organization, clarifying your requirements, and having them suggest the most appropriate solution for the same.
3. Check Compatibility and Scalability
While ensuring compatibility with your existing systems, evaluate whether the platform can grow with your business. Below are a few parameters on which you can make the right choice.
- Integration with existing tools
- Customization and flexibility
- Scalability for growth
- Cloud-based vs. On-premise
A scalable, low-code, no-code platform like Dista Sales integrates easily with your infrastructure and systems and is highly customizable. This helps eliminate repetitive manual tasks to save effort, time and cost.
4. Compare and Analyze
It is always advisable to ask the platform provider if they can offer you a free demo. To simplify matters, you can also list down the critical features you need and compare the reviews on online review platforms.
5. Evaluate Pricing
While cost, by no means, is the only parameter by which to judge the suitability of the platform, it is certainly an important one. Along with the initial set-up cost, businesses must also consider,
- Total cost of ownership
- Pricing tiers & flexibility
- ROI potential
Top 5 Features of Field Sales Automation Software
Choosing the right field sales automation software involves understanding its features and ensuring they align with your business objectives.
1. Lead Management
Field sales automation software automates and improves lead-capturing and actioning. It helps sales reps connect, engage, and follow up with prospects while keeping track of their daily sales targets.
A robust and agile field sales management software like Dista Sales helps businesses efficiently manage leads within a defined territory. It analyzes key variables such as sales reps’ specific skills, location, availability, workload, and experience to assign leads. By automating this process, the software saves time, minimizes errors, and removes redundant planning efforts.
Moreover, sales managers can manually override assignments, ensuring the right reps handle the most suitable leads.
Read how Dista Sales leverages the S.P.A.C.E framework to assign leads.
2. Territory Mapping and Beat Planning
Lack of visibility on essential data points in a region can lead to businesses missing out on new or existing business opportunities.
Using territory mapping and beat planning, sales managers can:
- Expand sales coverage with automated territory mapping
- Map resources to territories for an equitable load distribution
- Better visualize prospect and customer density in a territory
- Use that information with other data points for targeted campaigns
- Reach customers first to outperform competitors
- Optimize sales visits by improving field communication
Dista Sales enables sales managers to improve territory mapping using multiple configurable business variables and rules defined by the algorithm. With location intelligence, it can map customers and competition in a defined territory.
For instance, Dista Sales empowers sales managers in the BFSI industry by providing territory-specific customer insights. This allows managers to make data-driven decisions when assigning sales agents, ensuring they are matched to the right customers based on their skills, experience, and expertise.
By optimizing agent allocation, our location-first field sales automation software enhances customer engagement, sales productivity, and overall business performance.
3. Scheduling and Route Planning
Field sales management software can enable sales reps to utilize the shortest, fastest, and safest routes. Verified addresses and live location tracking help improve route planning and task scheduling.
Scheduling and route planning can help sales reps:
- Increase the number of customers engaged in a day
- Boost customer face time
- Use dynamic scheduling to improve sales visit frequency
- Improve sales productivity with intelligent beat plans
4. Sales Rep Management
Sales managers can meet their targets only when the team performs collectively. Lead allocation and scheduling are just the first few steps..
Key software features for sales managers:
- Track individual and team sales performance
- Enable data-driven sales forecasts to assign leads among efficient sales reps
- Monitor end-to-end field rep activity tracking with live location
- Send smart contextual nudges, reminders, and real-time alerts
- Help reps upsell and cross-sell with sales coaching
5. Mobile Office for Sales Reps
Field sales automation software offers a complete mobile app for sales reps to manage daily tasks and scheduled activities. They can stay connected with managers, get real-time task updates, and use interactive chat features for seamless communication.
Field sales reps can:
- Share instant updates with managers
- Plan, schedule, and reschedule meetings on the go
- Manage daily attendance and leaves
- Access the leaderboard to get team performance insights
- Use one-tap calling and chat to engage with managers
Final Thoughts
Sales reps and managers face numerous challenges such as, tracking productivity, territory planning and optimizing coverage, which ultimately results in inefficient lead actioning. Dista Sales, a field sales automation software, has helped leading enterprises achieve a 32% increase in lead conversion by improving lead management and enhancing sales rep efficiency.
It also helps managers gain visibility into sales operations, streamline territory management, and boost engagement with potential customers.
Looking for a smarter way to manage your field sales team? Get in touch with our team for a free demo!
Gartner Peer Reviews: Dista Sales
