Is your foodservice manufacturer sales team competitive in a modern marketplace? Location-level insights are essential to effectively compete in today’s marketplace. They allow you to take a more targeted approach to optimizing sales performance, growing the business, and creating a culture of sales accountability.
What are location-level insights? Briefly, they are insights about the physical operator locations (also often referred to as “operator ship-to” locations) your products are being shipped to.
Here are 4 reasons why your foodservice sales team needs location-level insights.
Insight-Driven Decision Making at the Sales Rep Level
Do your sales reps understand month-over-month performance drivers in their books of business? Do they have easy access to performance numbers at the product, operator location, and segment level?
When your sales reps have performance insights at their fingertips and review them on a regular basis, they can be proactive instead of reactive when one of their accounts is at risk. They’re able to add whole new dimensions to customer conversations through regional insights–like which products an operators’ competitors are buying or which products turn especially well in their geography. They can provide insights into a specific customer’s location, like making recommendations for assortment optimization. With readily available insights, they can answer inquiries and solve problems for their customers on the spot, instead of having to redirect them to the distributor. The manufacturer sales rep becomes their operator customers’ “go-to” resource.
Focused Trade Initiatives
Do you have segment-specific trade initiatives with conversion plans and a clear way to review your trade partners’ performance, or are you shooting in the dark?
Purchase data at the location level unlocks the ability to construct programs that provide the right level of trade support for a specific segment, since different segments typically require different levels of trade. Instead of creating broad initiatives based on a product or region, you can target trade dollars to maximize impact. Moreover, with location-level tracking, you can ensure only the right types of operators are leveraging those segment-specific programs.
Sales Accountability
Is sales performance self-reported in CRM, or is it verified by transaction data? Are performance conversations and coaching data-driven?
As all sales leaders know, sales rep performance metrics must be aligned with organizational goals. Tracking sales performance using self-reporting in CRM allows you to know when the customer made a commitment to purchase a product, but not if that commitment resulted in an actual purchase. Location-level visibility allows reps to validate their reported sales and allows leaders to understand how much their teams are driving revenue that is aligned with annual goals.
In addition, performance metrics enable sales leaders to construct data-driven performance reviews and conduct regular check-ins based on those metrics. Sales leaders can thus target coaching efforts precisely where their reps are underperforming or work on specific strategies to help their reps excel.
Relevant Sales Targets
Are you able to provide your sales team with specific, actionable, initiative-based sales call targets?
A holistic picture of buying habits unlocked by location-level insights is a highly effective toolset for identifying high-quality opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, and new-sell. Opportunities within existing operator customers can be based on specific product voids, product assortments, segments, or product initiatives. Opportunities with new customers can be based on purchases by similar operators in a specific region of interest. With readily available location-level insights, opportunities like these can be identified by one person in a single afternoon, rather than having a whole team analyze for days or even weeks.
How Tibersoft Can Help
Getting to the point where location-level insights are widely available – not to mention regularly used – by the majority of your sales organization can be a significant challenge, both technically and from an internal process standpoint. Tibersoft has been transforming data strategy at the most innovative foodservice organizations since 1996. With a combination of technical expertise and process know-how, we can help you create a sales organization driven by location level-insights, regardless of where you are along the journey today.
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