Managing a retail mobile workforce isn’t easy. As a team leader, you need to motivate them to perform and exceed their sales goals and give them the space and time to focus on their work while showing enough trust in them to complete their work. However, all these tasks become exponentially more difficult as your team grows.
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Some tasks can become practically impossible.
Instead of having decent control over your team, you’re juggling them ineffectively, which means you can make mistakes.
Here are six signs that you’re working too hard and must change how you manage your field marketers, merchandisers, and reps.
As your team grows, it’s important to understand that you can’t be everywhere at once. That also means that you can’t prove if your team was physically at a store or even on time.
It is no doubt a frustrating thought. If you’re currently in charge of a team, you’ve also likely lost sleep over this exact problem as your team has grown.
However, let’s look at this from a different angle. Treat it as a positive: your team is growing, which means you’re doing something right. Now it’s up to you to change the way you manage your team.
Your product may be the best in terms of both quality and price. Even your competitors might admit that if they were truthful. However, that doesn't mean a thing if it's not on the shelf and available for purchase.
That means that the public won’t be able to buy your product, which can lead to two situations, both of which are unfortunately negative for the retailer.
Firstly, their customers will lose faith in their store having the product or products they want, which means they’ll stop coming. Secondly, they’ll start losing money, and their competition will ultimately beat them. Also, you'll lose money.
Likewise, if you’re a supplier who wants to maximize in-store sales, you must be able to measure store compliance at all times. If you can't measure store compliance, how will you know if your brand is handled fairly?
Even if you can measure store compliance and check in on your brands at store level now and then, it’s often too late.
Instead of checking in once or twice a day, your field and trade marketers need to be able to see your brands at the store level as they are audited in real-time. Anything other than real-time will put you at a disadvantage.
As much as software such as Dropbox or WhatsApp are amazing tools for image storage, sharing, and communication, that doesn’t mean you should be using them to manage your field marketers, merchandisers, and reps.
These types of programs are not built for this particular task. Not only do they not make use of standards or comply with specific criteria when doing store audits but they also can’t make stock suggestions. You can also waste your time trying to draw any meaningful conclusions from store photographs taken, reports compiled, or any store data that is wrongly formatted.
It’s best to have a single solution to fit your needs.
Nobody enjoys doing anything manually if they know they have the opportunity to do it automatically.
The same can be said for compiling reports. Done manually, you’re taking up precious time that you could use to focus on other important aspects of your work. But it’s more than that. Manually compiling a report can also lead to inaccuracies, which is one of the last things you want if you’re rushed for time or can’t afford mistakes.
In automating this process, you’ll become that much more productive, which can ease any frustration or pressure on your part.
Knowing of any ongoing trends that have already occurred or are about to take place puts you at a significant advantage.
It allows you to see what is working and what isn’t, and it will also allow you to plan for the future. You may even have the opportunity to predict what will work.
On the other hand, being unable to measure these trends (or even see them) will put you at an extreme disadvantage as your field marketers, merchandisers, and sales reps won’t be able to function as efficiently as possible.
Conclusion
There is no shame in admitting that you’re struggling to manage your growing team and need to change the way you work. Acknowledging such a fact is the first step towards getting yourself back on the right path so that you can be as effective as possible.