Skynamo – the leading provider of field sales technology – carried out extensive research recently. Spanning hundreds of manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors around the world, all with field sales teams, several pertinent challenges and successes were revealed over the course of 2021.
The resultant Field Sales Benchmark Report for 2021 gives some interesting insights into how the Food and Beverage industry’s sales teams compare in terms of common industry-specific challenges, the technology used, and sales rep productivity.
But that was not enough for Skynamo. They added insight from their well-known Industry Thermometer to reveal even more insights into the food and beverage industry.
Here are some of the highlights:
Food & Bev is Skyrocketing
The Skynamo Thermometer reflects growth of over 435% in the food and beverage industry, since October 2020.
Of the over 1,000 companies across 26 different industry segments being monitored by the Skynamo Thermometer, October has shown even further growth as the graph has continued to climb steadily, as it has done since January 2021.
The food and beverage industry has already surpassed the sum of the average value of total orders per customer converted in 2020, in July of this year.
ERP vs CRM
The benchmark report reveals that, in the food and beverage industry, the most popular enterprise resource planning system (ERP) used is SAGE.
While it was found that the majority of businesses in this industry did not have a customer relationship management solution (CRM) in place, Skynamo’s survey revealed that of the food and beverage respondents that answered to having a CRM in place, mostly use a combination of paper, email, Excel and WhatsApp as their CRM software.
Suggested reading: Choose the best fit: CRM and sales force automation are not the same thing
Challenges that slow sales down
When Skynamo asked business owners, sales managers and reps in the food and beverage industry in South Africa, the US, and the UK, what they found the most challenging about their jobs and daily activities, their responses revealed that they could not see what their sales teams were up to in the field.
They also felt overwhelmed by the amount of manual admin they had to deal with each day.
How you doin’? It’s time to find out.
We recommend downloading the full report to find out how your field sales team and technology compare to other manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors from around the world.
Download your own copy of The Field Sales Benchmark Report 2021 from Skynamo today!
