Challenge
Setting the right sales goals
Aaron Berger knows what it takes to succeed in outside sales. He's gone from high performing outside sales rep to owning one of the most successful construction supply distribution companies in the Mountain Region. “I saw probably twenty plus stops a day," Berger said.
So when his outside sales team sets goals, he knows how these targets match with the reality of the market. “My guys totally set goals that are ridiculously low. It was literally half, if not a third, of what they needed to hit per day," he said. Aaron's team had to recalibrate what it thought was possible. He needed them to find ways to get in front of more customers and prospects.
"The more people you can visit, the more opportunities you’re going to get. I always preach to my sales team that about 20% of people you walk in and see every day are going to be orders or opportunities you never got before. It’s a numbers game,” he said.
Solution
Implementing structure
Sales reps only have so much time to visit customers and prospects each day. The best sales reps find ways to fit more visits into their days. Some have the drive to do it on their own, but many will need help to realize they can hit far higher targets with the right tools and mindset.
"When you’re looking at your sales team and looking at all these variables, the average seems to be about six per day they can hit," Berger said. As a top performer in his outside sales days, he knew six visits a day would not cut it. He needed a way to help them achieve more. Success would start with better planning. "In reality they can hit many more stops, assuming they can prepare for the day,” he said.
Aaron's team began planning and structuring their days with RepMove. They started creating optimized sales routes. This gave them more time to fit extra visits into their days. It also helped his reps visualize their accounts geographically. They began to find opportunities on their sales routes to fit more customer visits into their plans easily.
It didn't stop with visiting more customers and prospects. Tool Country's sales team also had more productive sales meetings and ongoing customer engagement. "It has helped them a lot with their follow-up," he said. RepMove has made it easy for his team to create reminders and notes so things didn't fall through or get left behind on busy days. "It’s nice to be able to walk out of an account and everything is in the app. You’re leaving yourself a note in RepMove to do next time or do later and it’s done, it’s out of your mind, and you can move on.”
Results
Leveling up performance
Tool Country's outside sales team has seen significant results from using RepMove. "My guys went from hitting four to six stops a day on average. Now they’re building routes and trying to hit ten plus stops a day pretty easily," Berger said.
Beyond boosting rep performance, RepMove has also provided Aaron with the data he needs to better understand and analyze field activity. "I’ve always struggled with what my guys are doing out in the field," he said. While RepMove's mobile app makes reps more efficient at selling, its web-based app centralizes all this data so it's easy to access for managers. "It is nice to have a dashboard view of what my guys accomplished during the day. RepMove also allows you to drill down, drill into the account notes and everything else," he said.
Aaron uses the data to be a better coach and it helps him support his team when opportunities come up. "I need to be able to jump in and assist where I see that they could use some help or need direction. It allows me to be more connected with everybody and have as deep a dive as I need into what they’re doing daily," he said.
RepMove's impact doesn't stop at the sales level. “There’s huge value-adds other than sales productivity and oversight," Berger said. RepMove's ability to integrate with other tools has been a difference-maker. "We use Oracle NetSuite. Most of your ERPs will have the ability to API in. The nice thing about RepMove is they can build a custom API so essentially if you’re putting a new jobsite into your ERP, it can automatically API over to RepMove. Same thing if they add a new lead into RepMove it can go back into NetSuite for me.”
Tool Country has rapidly grown into a powerhouse distributor. Aaron's dedication and his outside sales team's advancement position the company to continue rising. RepMove has helped along the way, too.
“I’ve used a lot of software. I’ve tried just about everything. RepMove is the one that I’ve found that really ties everything together.”
