Customer outlet visit is a term not new to us. Every successful sales and distribution story is closely tied to successful customer outlet visits. Manufacturers, Distributors and other key players in the industry are in constant pursue of a larger customer base as growth of revenue will be ultimately achieved.
Not once or twice have we heard or read articles of key players in the industry complain of few to zero sales in outlets despite the long hours spent under the sun visiting customer outlets. Even with well stipulated organizational goals, this seems to be a major issue to majority of us if not all. It can be demoralizing, we understand! The myriad of questions of “what are we not doing right” has crossed our minds in several occasions and to be quite honest, different board meetings to seek answers have been held.
Today, we unravel a few secret tips behind a successful outlet visit. Do take a read.
1. Exemplary customer service
Just like any other business, hiring and developing employees (Sales Reps) who can provide top notch customer service during customer outlet visits is as important as increasing organizational revenue. Your employees are the people who are doing the selling, so if you’re looking to increase sales, stuff investment is paramount.
2. Offering incentives to customers.
Zero sales outlets is a term common in the sales and distribution sphere. You wonder why a sales rep is making zero sales in a customer outlet even after multiple visits? Try offering incentives to customers. Retailers might be getting better incentives or offers from your competitors hence the need to stock your competitors products and not yours.
3. Examining your price strategy
As you are aiming to gain a competitive edge in the market, selling at reasonable and affordable prices to your target audience guarantees success of your reps outlet visits.
4.Setting reasonable and attainable sales targets
Once company goals are set, communicating these goals and allocated individual targets to your employees is the next step. This promotes accountability hence keeping the employee on toes with how much they should sell in a day and how much time each should spend in an outlet among other key information. To increase visibility of sales targets, deploying an efficient sales system goes a long way in ensuring outlet visit success. An employee is able to track his or her daily sales progress.
5. Investing in a Sales Force Automaton (SFA) Tool
Automate! Automate! Automate! This cannot be sensitized enough. Giving sales reps enough time to interact more with customers while in outlets as opposed to spending a lot of time inputting and/or retrieving customer data will ultimately lead to the success of outlet visits. The reps will be able to increase sales and eventually realize profits which is the goal.
Are you now ready to roll up your sleeves and adjust accordingly? We hope you are! but before we put down the pen, we would like to reiterate that a successful customer outlet visit is complemented with an efficient Sales Force Automation tool. This is the umbrella of it all. An all inclusive tool that encompasses different features to scale up your sales and distribution journey.
Reduce the paperwork, time wastage among other benefits with an all inclusive SFA tool like SolutechSAT.
To understand what Solutech SAT is and the benefits you deem to reap from it so as to unlock your business full potential.
