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The Best Practices of Hiring Field Sales Reps


In our previous article we talked about a good salesperson’s characteristics, which are important to identify when hiring field sales representatives. Knowing about these qualities is important, if you want to hire good sales reps, but it’s also necessary to adapt this set of personal characteristics to your business specific. To find the exact qualities, a rep needs to be successful in your company, turn your attention to your top-performing field reps. By tracking the successful field reps you can better understand the qualities that help them to sell your products and then use this information for hiring new field reps, looking for the same attributes.

Ranking Your Field Reps By Using KPIs
Before identifying the most important personal qualities of field reps in your company, you 'll have to rank your reps. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used in field sales management to measure the success of field representatives at achieving certain goals. Although the success of a sales rep is typically evaluated based on the sales-related indicators, there also are a great variety of indicators that do not involve sales.

At first sight, lots of data is available for field team managers to analyze sales reps performance. On the other hand, data gathering, visualization and analysis can be really challenging. Field team management software not only allows your field reps to automate retail visits and tasks performance, but also provides real-time data workflow to generate reports on their activities. If your team is empowered with a kind of a field sales mobile solution, your field team managers can easily get the following information:
  • Progress in carrying out the tasks
  • Work hours
  • Field reps/customers timesheets
  • Photos, taken in the field
  • Actions performed
  • Visits and tasks data
  • Orders and returns
  • GPS-locations

The following main indicators that allow field team managers to assess various aspects of field team performance:
  • Sales volume
  • Ratio of order and shipping volumes
  • Number of orders and returns
  • Average size of an order
  • Completion ratio, counted as a relation between scheduled and actually performed visits.
  • Proportion of active customers, serviced by a field rep
  • Conversion rate, which is a percentage of deals that are successfully closed.
  • Closing rate that is calculated as the number of proposals per sale.
  • Reach rate that can be defined as the percentage of outbound actions (mailing, calling, conducting a presentation) that provide productive meetings with customer representatives, involving ordering, signing contract and etc.
  • Customer response time is the response time for customer requests.
  • New customers acquisition indicator allows managers to identify the sales reps that bring more customers than others

Field team management software can greatly improve the analysis of field team performance by automating store data collection and providing great variety of analytic tools for field team managers to assess sales reps activities in the field.


When it comes to analyzing field reps’ performance, VisitBasis is one of the most complete field team management solutions in the market. It offers several ways for managers to compile, filter, and read data, so users of all backgrounds (and not only "IT people") can quickly view the data they are looking for.


Sign up today at www.visitbasis.com to get our field team management software solution free of charge or schedule a free online demo to see how you can easily analyze your field team performance using up-to-date mobile tools.

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