Our data highlights three factors that play a significant role in outside sales teams’ ability to visit their customers regularly, build trust, and improve their sales.
Is it true that more regular customer visits equal more sales for outside sales teams? A Harvard Business Review (HBR) survey done after the 2008 financial crisis indicated that business leaders understood healthy relationships to be crucial to sustainable business success, and that these relationships depend on face-time with customers.
Is this still the case in the present, more digitized economy?
Recent research by XANT suggests that it’s not simply a matter of more sales but also of better sales. Outside salespeople typically have a higher sales quota to reach (29.6% higher than inside salespeople) and have a 30.2% higher close rate, resulting in deals that are 130.2% bigger on average than those of inside salespeople.
Our own customer data gathered through Skynamo Analytics also indicates a strong correlation between number of customer visits and invoice values.
Find out more about Skynamo Analytics and see examples of custom reports.
We’ve identified three factors that play a significant role in our customers’ ability to visit their customers regularly and improve their sales, despite health and safety considerations that complicate outside sales activities:
1. Good data
2. Good planning
3. Good relationships
As is the case with any “golden triangle”, the three sides tend to be interdependent. Good planning can’t happen without good data, good relationships depend on good planning and relationship management, and good data is more freely shared when relationships are strong.
Good data
Good data is both collected and shared. One of the reasons face-to-face customer visits are so valuable is because customers are more likely to share qualitative data (e.g., pain points, fears, buying strategies) with visiting salespeople. Skynamo’s mobile sales platform enables sales professionals to capture this data along with other quantitative data (current stock levels, orders, etc.)
Sales team managers can set up various forms according to their data capturing needs and their customers’ business models. Skynamo’s digital forms enable sales reps to capture any relevant data during their visits. This data is immediately synced with their business’s financial system and made available in a format that is useful for planning and decision-making. This same data can be shared with customers when sales teams do follow-up visits. So our customers can help their customers make more informed buying decisions, based on updated historic data available to them on their mobile devices.
Good planning
Good planning requires good data that is both accurate and readily available. Skynamo’s outside sales platform ensures that data is easily captured, updated and accessible to all the stakeholders depending on that information to do their jobs well.
Understanding customers’ buying needs and buying rhythms help sales teams to plan their visits better. Visits should not simply happen frequently but also at the right times. Good historic data helps our customers understand which customers need to be visited when, according to their unique industry and individual needs.
Knowing how to optimize your visit frequency is even more important at the moment, where unnecessary face-time is discouraged and competition for customers’ attention has become more fierce.
Good relationships
The best way to stay ahead of your competition and make sure you capture good quality data is to maintain good relationships. Good planning based on good data can go a long way in building and maintaining trust with customers.
Skynamo’s sales platform helps outside sales teams build trust from a distance, enabling them to conduct regular, quality customer visits. Salespeople don’t only build trust by visiting customers at the most convenient times, but also by visiting them in the most appropriate ways.
It is important for our customers to comply with safety regulations and put the businesses they visit at ease prior to arriving at their premises. We’ve developed checklists for both sales managers and outside sales teams to help them ensure they run their daily activities in the safest way possible. What we’ve found is that sales teams use these checklists when they schedule visits, communicating to their customers which safety measures they comply with in preparation for and during their visits.
We’ve also made a Daily Clock-In Screening Form available to our mobile app users to help them manage their own compliance from their mobile devices.
These features are not only compliance checks but also provide outside sales reps with an opportunity to build trust in their customer relationships.
Skynamo empowers sales teams by giving them the right tools and support to plan and make decisions in a rapidly changing environment.
Find the solution that works best for your sales team and make every visit count:
- Skynamo Analytics: Custom sales reports help sales teams to interpret data better
- Business Owner & Sales Manager checklist: comply with outside sales health & safety regulations
- Sales Team checklist: comply with outside sales health & safety regulations
- Field Sales Managers & Business Owners – Health & Safety Guide: guidelines and best practices by medical industry experts
- Field Sales Team – Health & Safety Guide: guidelines and best practices by medical industry experts
- Daily Clock-In Screening Form: a personal daily health monitor on your mobile device
- Industry Thermometer: see how other companies in your industry performed over recent months
