South African field sales teams need liberation, not just supervision

Speak to anyone who has experience in the South African field sales environment, whether they’re serving importers, manufacturers, wholesalers, or distributors, and they’ll agree that there’s still a legendary piece of technology being used in the market: the back of a cigarette box. Laugh if you will, but it’s still where many orders are scribbled, and terms are hashed out.

The box is usually photographed and then sent via WhatsApp to field sales reps who hurriedly forward it to the admin office. Enter the silent tax levied on businesses: the cost of transactional friction. Mistakes creep in, orders are botched, customers become annoyed and sales reps and admin clerks have arguments.

For many South African business leaders, especially sales directors, the initial foray into investing in software is driven by a classic, almost primal need for visibility. It’s the base of something that resembles a hierarchy of sales department needs.

Moving beyond the baseline of visibility

Visibility of field reps is the starting point, but not the endgame. The true goal of digital transformation in the South African field sales context is to move up the hierarchy of enablement.

• Visibility: Sales directors want to know the team is in the field, meeting with the right customers when they say they are. They need visibility.
• Information: Beyond visibility, the sales director next asks what information the sales rep needs to do his or her job more effectively. The sales rep asks for the information they know they need. This involves giving the team real-time data to see things such as credit blocks, stock levels, pricing fluctuations and order history.
• Influence: This is the peak of enablement. It’s where the salesperson stops acting like an order taker and starts being a trusted advisor, empowered by information at their fingertips.

The human connection

A recent discussion with a customer brought home a very important point. Many businesses sell products that are highly technical, with various specifications tailored for different contexts. This requires specialised understanding. This customer needs his sales people to be sitting in front of his customers to listen, converse and influence the sale.

Out in the field, South Africa is a largely people-to-people economy. We thrive on rapport and being able to tap into technical expertise. In this environment, if businesses wish to remain competitive in a tough market (and it is currently very tough out there), they must approach digital transformation with this lens: Let machines do what machines are good at: processing, tracking, and real-time analysing. This clears the path for humans to do what they are good at doing – building relationships. The result is that when a salesperson walks into a room, they aren’t there to take an order, they are there to strengthen relationships and build the business they represent.

Stripping out the friction

The hidden cost of a mis-captured order is more than just a line item. It’s a return, a credit note, a frustrated warehouse manager, and a salesperson arguing with an office administrator. It is friction. Friction comes at a cost.

Here, intelligent platforms leverage AI where it thrives and humans struggle. This isn’t to replace staff, it’s to interpret the photo of handwriting on the back of the cigarette box, or to analyse a hastily sent voice note, and then to push that data straight into the business’s ERP system. This is where technology solves a pain point, like hours of evening admin, so that staff can focus on their core jobs.

The high cost of “popping in for a coffee”

The cost of mobility has soared. That’s not just the ever-increasing cost of petrol and diesel, but also the sheer time sales reps spend in traffic on increasingly busy roads. In some areas, regular power outages cause traffic bottlenecks. In this environment, South African businesses can no longer afford the status quo of popping into the regular customer for a Wednesday morning coffee. Could the time be spent more efficiently elsewhere?

This is another area where software earns its keep. Intelligently designed field sales applications incorporate tools for RFM analysis – recency, frequency and monetary value of purchases. This intelligence empowers field sales reps to make smarter decisions about where, and when, to spend their time.

It moves away from “they’re nice to visit” towards there’s been a significant shift in their buying patterns over time, is there a risk or opportunity I need to address? Reps can make decisions on optimising sales with customers doing well and can invest time in visits to find out where their market share is going and what they need to do to regain it.

Shifting from supervision to enablement

The shift from supervision to enablement isn’t (always) a one-week software implementation. It is most often a long-term investment in the business’s most valuable asset: its people.

As humans, we maintain and value what we help build. When field sales teams move away from the friction of manual admin and start using tools that provide genuine insight, they stop feeling managed and start feeling empowered to build long-term, trust relationships with their customers. The cigarette box may well be a legendary part of a sales team’s past, but it certainly doesn’t have to be the ceiling for its future.