For any business to succeed, they’ll need to successfully sell their products. This is true of both online retailers and those with real, physical stores that you might walk into. An enormous amount of work must be performed to make the miracle of modern commerce occur every day. Point of sale system must be designed, manufactured, installed and maintained; trucks must be unloaded and deliveries scheduled; and shelves must be stacked.
For each of these tasks, there exists a staff member who’ll devote a significant chunk of their time to performing them. No successful business, after all, organises itself in such a way that every member of staff splits their time evenly between the different sorts of work that must be done. Store managers have more effective ways to contribute than by stacking shelves (though occasionally leading by example is welcome.)
So far, so obvious. But, for many reasons, this logic isn’t extended to certain administrative tasks. By bringing in outside help in the form of a field sales agency like Tactical Solutions, to assist with the tasks for which you’ve no expertise, you’ll be able to hugely improve the effectiveness of your store. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why this might be the case.
Specialists
The first and most obvious benefit of bringing in an outside specialist is that they’ll be much better at the task in question than you could possibly be. For certain rarely-performed tasks, like auditing and product recall, the average retailer doesn’t have the opportunity to garner the necessary experience to perform well, anticipate problems and eliminate them ahead of time. For a business which performs these tasks on a daily basis, on the other hand, will naturally amass a considerable amount of expertise in performing them.
Expertise
Naturally, improvement in a task will come about with practise. But this alone isn’t enough to continue improving forever. Unless practice is combined with evaluation and feedback, the same errors will creep into the performance again and again.
A specialist company will devote a portion of their resources toward analysing their own performance, identifying problems and correcting them. In time, this will yield tremendous improvements in efficiency.
Technology
Specialist companies will be able to invest in specialist technologies which will vastly improve their ability to perform a task. Analysing the performance of everything, from retail stores to golf swings, has been made possible with the application of new technologies. You’re therefore likely to see representatives from field marketing agencies wielding tablet computers loaded with new and intuitive database software.
This technology will make it easier not only to collect information, but to distribute it. You’ll be privy to up-to-the-minute progress reports via your email inbox when you work with a specialist company, as you’ll have effectively pooled your resource with the company’s other clients to create a dedicated specialist department charged with performing crucial tasks with an efficiency that even the most well-resourced retailer couldn’t replicate.
Demonstrations
There are some products whose merits need to be competently communicated. This is where a dedicated performer can come in exceptionally handy; they’ll be able to get across the merits of a product in a manner that doesn’t place a strain on the customer’s patience, and which crams the maximum amount of information into the allotted time. By working together with a dedicated field-marketing company, you’ll have access to a pool of demonstration talent that you could never hope to match internally – even with the benefit of years of training. For companies who only need to perform demonstrations every so often, bringing in outside help is an obvious solution.
Sampling
Just as some products will benefit especially from a competent demonstration, there are others for which product sampling is incredibly useful. There are some qualities, after all, which can’t be communicated through words or images, but which can be appreciated instantly with a sampling.
Since product sampling involves giving a small portion of your product away for free, it’s often associated with inexpensive items who merits can be appreciated instantly – like washing powder, hair gel and chocolate biscuits. This shouldn’t be the limit of your demonstration ambition, however; just consider that car dealerships offer test drives in expensive sports cars to customers they think are ripe for conversion. A dedicated sampling specialist will be able to target sampling campaigns toward the customers most likely to be receptive, and thus they’ll hugely boost the return you receive on your initial investment.
