Field sales representatives are critical to wholesale company success. They maintain retail relationships, ensure product availability, and drive revenue growth. This guide covers building effective teams, optimizing processes, and implementing necessary tools.
Building Your Wholesale Field Sales Team
Identifying Potential Team Members
Consider current employees seeking advancement as recruitment sources. Follow this process:
- Identify attributes of successful team members
- Review current employees for candidates
- Post openings and solicit interest
- Interview and narrow the candidate pool
- Have prospects shadow experienced reps
- Eliminate candidates based on field experience
- Follow company protocol for job offers
Supplement internal recruitment with recommendations from current sales team members, managers, and LinkedIn searches.
Top Skill Set for Your Reps
Successful wholesale field sales reps possess:
- Customer-service skills: The ability to listen to the client’s needs and concerns
- Interpersonal skills: Willingness to work with diverse people and build relationships
- Self-confidence: Comfort with presentations and cold calling despite rejection
- Stamina: Physical capability for long days with extended standing and walking
Additional requirements include comfort with internet basics (email, chat, video conferencing), phone communication skills, stress management, and ability to handle income dependent on sales quotas.
Evaluating & Coaching Your Reps for Success
Beyond sales figures alone, evaluate these metrics:
- Closing rate and average deal size
- Time to close deals and sales volume
- Lost sales frequency and patterns
- Non-sales time allocation (meetings, email, calls)
- Lead response time
- Customer order fulfillment efficiency
Effective coaching involves:
- Setting daily and contact-specific goals
- Listening to sales pitches and providing constructive feedback
- Ensuring accurate customer information
- Assessing confidence and comfort levels
- Monitoring professional etiquette and courtesy
Top Trends for Wholesale Teams
Industry consolidation is forcing smaller retailers to merge, increasing demand for large national wholesalers and specialization needs.
Key technological advances include:
- Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI): Automated inventory control eliminating manual ordering
- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): Electromagnetic field technology for automatic stock tracking
Strategies to Optimize Your Team in the Field
Harvard Business Review notes that high-performing sales organizations use standardized processes for activity tracking, territory management, and lead generation.
Activity Tracking
Managers can monitor customer visits, sales presentations, proposals sent, phone calls, leads followed up, emails, and closed deals through automated software.
Territory Management
Effective territory management involves:
- Defining territories based on industry or company goals
- Setting specific sales goals
- Evaluating territories against goals over time
- Assessing rep performance within territorial frameworks
The process requires ongoing adjustment and continuous skill-building.
Lead Generation
“The brain takes mere 13 milliseconds to interpret an image,” making data visualization more effective than raw data. Visual territory mapping helps reps identify efficiencies and strategically plan next moves.
Top Wholesale Sales Tools to Use
Modern platforms should integrate with existing systems, offer mobile compatibility, provide visual mapping, automate tasks, and enable data visualization by territory.
Recommended tools:
- Map My Customers: Optimized sales routing reducing windshield time 30% average; available on iPhone, iPad, Android
- Tableau: Powerful business intelligence with analytics visualization; pricing inflexibility noted
- FineReport: Excel-like interface with 24/7 technical support; limited chart recommendations
- Power BI: Microsoft product taking Excel to advanced visualization; free version limited to under 2GB
Insider Tips of the Trade
- Monitor rep job satisfaction and acknowledge importance
- Embrace technology for daily task optimization
- Consolidate multi-channel orders for efficiency
- Show appreciation for retail customers recognizing relationship-building timelines
- Maintain outstanding customer service differentiation
- Hire people believing in products
- Benchmark reps with clear goals and individual progress evaluation
Set Up Your Team for Success
Success requires combining valuable sales skills, effective training and leadership, and optimized sales tools with inventory management processes for long-term revenue growth.
