3 Steps to Becoming an Effective Retail Field Manager

A retail field manager is marketing, promotional and event professional supervising a team of field representatives, who perform regular retail visits at points of sale. Field manager’s essential duty is to supervise employees, who work outside the office, ensuring field team members performing their responsibilities in the field.

A good retail field manager is that, who has a system in place, which runs smoothly to ensure every field rep works as effectively as possible in the field. To achieve this goal retail field manager carries many other duties, including:

• Providing training programs to the field reps
• Evaluating performance of field employees
• Maintaining all the field rules and policies
• Responding to on-call tasks and responsibilities
• Handling the needs and concerns of every field staff
• Raising the level of motivation of field reps under his supervision

As we can see, field manager’s job involves flexibility, advanced time management skills, ability to switch between responsibilities and quickly respond to changes, attention to details, and communicative skills.

Below you’ll find 3 basic areas to focus on, where improvements can make the difference between a retail field manager and a good retail field manager.

1. Provide your field reps with the latest technology to maximize efficiency. The traditional methods of field team work organization via paper-based task forms, emails and manual data entry is outdated, time-consuming and inefficient. Today your field reps can perform all the variety of retail tasks in the field using just their tablets and smartphones, and you can see the results live from anywhere using Web-based dashboards. Merchandising activities, retail audits, customer surveys, competitor analysis and field sales become a breeze when you implement a field team management software solution.
2. Track sales history and field reps’ performance to evaluate trends and get valuable insights for your marketing strategy. Retail field managers often are so busy responding to the arising issues and catching the current problems, that they simply don’t have time and enthusiasm to analyze general trends. A good retail field manager is that, who can think strategically and adjust policies and strategies in accordance with to constantly changing retail conditions. Field team management software allows to analyze huge amount of data from retail locations very quickly, allowing retail field managers to get the exact data they need at the moment with just a click of a button.
3. Maintain real-time communication. When managers are always aware of the needs of field reps they can resolve point of sale situations, requiring attention, immediately. Real-time communication with field reps can help to improve their efficiency and raise the level of motivation. Field team management software provides the unique team communication framework, allowing managers to interact with field reps directly. Managers can easily be thankful and specific, when showing appreciation, writing comments and feedbacks to specific tasks, which are instantly seen by field reps. When field reps realize their operations are constantly being watched and appreciated, if done properly, their motivation is growing.

To get your free access to VisitBasis field team management software, register at www.visitbasis.com. To get more information about field team management, book a free online demo, or read our previous articles.

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