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How can you tell if your organization’s process is effective? Do you have the sneaking suspicion that you could be doing things more efficiently? You’re not alone! Take a peek at some of the common pain points that reps experience.

Top 10 Pain Points for Field Teams

1. Content When You Need It

It’s challenging as a salesperson to not be able to find the exact content you need at the exact time you need it. This can be the make or break of a sale. Searching through thousands of emails, Dropboxes and similar programs is NOT effective time management.

2. Speed

It feels like sales is supercharged and marketing is constantly slow. You are not wrong, this is a direct result of the investment and effort the brand has put into making sure the customer receives the brands product. In many instances, the marketing team does not have a good system that automates process. They manage everything on spreadsheets.

3. Low Communication Accountability

When you send information from a variety of sources (eg. email, phone calls and texts), it’s easy for things to get miscommunicated or lost in the marketing department. Poor communication is a huge downfall for any employee, especially when it is unclear who is responsible for certain deliverables.

4. Too Many Platforms

Is your brand having to log into Dropbox, email, Slack, text, Google Sheets and the like only to find inconsistent organization, old information and never what you need?

5. Lack of Optics

Do you have a hard time finding out if fixtures and displays are in inventory? Do you know if any of your retailer’s custom advertising or creative is in production? Have your requests been approved? Not being able to report back to your retail partners is super frustrating for reps.

6. Lack of Process

Does it seem that everybody wants the information from the field in slightly different ways, and there’s no defined process you can follow? You’re probably right, this is what happens when functional groups inside a brand use spreadsheets to craft process.

7. Department Wars

As a field rep, you’re saddled with getting sales but need to retrieve all your sales tools from trade marketing. Trade marketing and sales do not communicate on the same level or platform which makes it difficult and from the reps point of view, it’s frustrating.

8. Poor GTM Structure

The Go-To-Market (GTM) process can be very complex. Every functional group needs to deliver on time. When this does not happen, your trade team can end up doing things very last minute.

9. In-Field Data

You probably have been asked by the brand for the same field information many times and it’s frustrating. It seems like the functional teams delivering sales tools do not care to manage the data you send in correctly. Simple data like market reports, surveys, windowfront sizing and fixture locations all seem to mysteriously disappear into lost spreadsheets and poor structure. This leaves the brand blind and deaf to the marketplace, the tools supplied for next season will always be off the mark.

10. Mismanaged Fixtures & Displays

If you don’t have a defined process, there are a number of things that can go wrong including distribution, economics, logistics, tracking, service, recall, repair and end of use. Do you know where all your fixtures are?

Sound familiar? These issues merely skim the surface when it comes to the depths of the issues facing field teams. Whether you have a couple, a few, or all these problems – Regulator will get your organization running smoother and faster than ever before. We find that most brands need all the help they can get. That’s what we’re here for.

More To Explore

In the Clubhouse, we will explore marketing from all perspectives. Pull up an apple crate, grab a beer. We will try to stay on topic but can’t promise that we won’t stray.

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