The value of field sales consultancy in an ever changing world

Using the Right Tools

Many businesses embarking on a journey to optimise their field sales teams have a defined strategy for the task. They understand what is required and how they can achieve their business’s goals. But what they don’t have is the right tool to make that strategy work and to achieve their business goals.

However, when you’ve been given a set of objectives to achieve without an action-oriented strategy to support you, it gets a little tricky. You have an idea of the broad direction in which you would like to head but your strategy lacks the data-driven and methodical approach to guarantee success. In plain terms, you’re working in the dark.

How do you really know what success looks like? How do you measure getting things right? How do you compare options, when manually creating just one version of the ‘future’ can take a day or two?

How do you deliver the goals that have been set out? And how do you know that your solution to that goal is the most efficient, and not just one of many possibilities?

That’s where our Field Force Planning consultancy services come into play.

Consultancy

CACI consultants provide a valuable partnership, whether you license our tools or not. Many of the consultancy projects we deliver are where companies choose not to go down the software route due to the resource, timescales, or lack of internal expertise.

Manually attempting to recut territories can take weeks, if not months of resource, time and effort. And when you lack the resource or expertise in-house, outsourcing the work to CACI can be just the right option.

We expertly guide clients to define an action plan and then work to execute that impartially and agilely.

The Biggest Benefit for Mondelez International from the Use of CACI is the Ability to Translate Our Strategic Plan Into a Concrete Action Plan.

Impartiality

Impartiality is key to the success of many of our projects. Some of the toughest emotional changes you must make when managing a field sales team, especially as we endure a global pandemic and businesses are looking at cost saving, are around downsizing or merging teams.

Having those difficult decisions taken out of your hands gives you objectivity and security in knowing that you made the right call and ensures that every decision point is transparent and fair.

Watch this space for an upcoming blog post about making structural changes to your field sales teams.

An Objective Third Party

Last year, one of our clients had a very detailed field sales territory reorganisation to tackle, which involved the merging of two large teams into a single team, and a reduction in headcount.

As a long-standing partner, we understood the sensitive, delicate nature of the project and the amount of change that the reorganisation would require. We helped them understand exactly how big the new team should be to achieve their RTM strategy and how staff could be assigned new territories in the fairest way.

This required a level of transparency and data-led decision-making only possible through an objective third party and sophisticated optimisation tools.

A project such as this is highly sensitive and requires a certain amount of discretion. Our consultants are experts in utilising the data and technology required to deliver the project in an impartial and professional manner. By leveraging the Field Force Planning team’s expertise, our client was able to remove any bias and make decisions validated by data, not emotion.

Is a Self-Service Approach the Most Effective Option?

Alongside the complexity of the project, there can be several reasons why you would choose a consultancy project rather than a self-service approach.

Ultimately, consultative expertise can enable increased flexibility, compartmentalisation of multiple projects and take away the pain of difficult decision-making (read more about this here).

CACI will be able to challenge your assumptions of your project and make sure you are able to define a workable, achievable strategy to measure the success of your project.

Nestlé Australia, worked with the team at CACI, initially on a consultancy basis, to perform two major pieces of work (view our customer story here).

I had the opportunity of working closely with the team at CACI on a large project that lasted over six months…the results have been extremely positive, highlighting how we can do more with less when we operate a lean and efficient team. With the expertise that we have developed, we are now using the software…to drive further efficiencies through our non-grocery business.

Speak to an Expert

At CACI we help teams with field force management on a daily basis, and over the past 30 years we’ve worked with organisations all over the world to add transparency and certainty to this balancing act.

Get in touch with us here to leverage the expertise of our consultants the next time you reorganise your territories or if you’d like to find out more about our Field Force Planning consultancy services.