FMCG Sales Agencies: How to Increase Your Profitability

Is your sales agency specialized in outsourcing sales force services and targeted towards brands selling their products in supermarkets and hypermarkets?

This article is for you!

As an agency, you have to balance the specific demands of your clients with your own profitability goals. Thus, offering an outsourced sales service comes with its share of challenges. Fortunately, a well-thought-out organization and the use of a dedicated CRM make it possible to simplify and automate tasks that previously weighted down your efficiency. In doing so, you can maximize the profitability of your operations and build loyalty with your manufacturing clients.

But let's start by looking at the economic context in which your agency operates!

Retail sector: market reorganization and opportunity for sales agencies

The number of brands present on the French market has never been so high. And yet, this is not the case for the number of retail outlets. On the contrary, after several decades of immobility, the retail market is starting to consolidate once again, with some brands absorbing new outlets.

Conclusion: it is increasingly hard for brands to get listed. As a provider of outsourced sales forces, you are therefore on the front lines of this market pressure. To top it all off, several successive years of inflation have worn down the purchasing power of consumers, leading some retailers to reduce the size of their assortments to focus value on a few key references, including private label brands!

These are all entry barriers that complicate prospecting for brands present in large and medium-sized stores. The good news is that your agency can benefit from this. But this requires reconciling 3 goals: 

1. Client goals: you must first achieve the goals of your principal: sales volume, market share, product placement, digital distribution rate, etc. ; 

2. Return on investment: you must prove that the ROI is positive, and that... it is thanks to you!

3. Achieving your goals: the main focus remains achieving your profitability goals by placing a maximum number of sales reps at the best price.

‍

Performance drivers for outsourced prospecting providers

Your profitability depends on various aspects. We have grouped them into two areas: the organization of time and resources, and the use of dedicated CRMs.

Organization of time and resources

The first strength of agencies is often resource pooling, through multi-brand sales representatives. By defining the right objectives, this cross-functionality allows you to multiply the value of sales visits. In other words, each appointment can generate value for several clients.

Your first reflex must therefore be to ban untargeted, unsuccessful visits. For this, it is essential that your field reps make appointments before traveling to stores. In addition, if an impromptu visit is scheduled during the tour, it must be done at the appropriate hours. To do this successfully, your area managers need to know their clients well! 

Next, it is important that each appointment has at least one goal (ensuring product availability, placing POS displays on shelves, checking the installation of a sales promotion, selling a promotion...). Once your goals are identified, it is advisable to optimize your sales route plans in order to find the ideal distribution of accounts to visit so that each appointment yields maximum results across multiple clients. We will see below that a CRM can do this at high speed and with an unmatched level of optimization!‍

Another crucial point: your sales reps must absolutely be made aware of the importance of data centralization. For example, encourage field salespeople to report data that represent important sales signals. Let's imagine that one of your sales reps learns that a shelf manager is about to leave and will be replaced soon. This information is valuable for all clients (current and future!) who are expected to offer their products in the store concerned. Capitalizing on data is therefore a strategic advantage you have over your clients.

‍Finally, remember to organize team meetings: the fact that your salespeople are assigned to different accounts could isolate them from one another. Group meetings are important because they allow mobile sellers to share issues and identify solutions through open exchange. Do not underestimate the power of collective intelligence: the rich perspective of a multi-sector sales force can help find best practices that your clients might not have thought of!

‍

The CRM, primary performance lever for sales agencies

Now let's move on to the main problem faced by external sales force agencies: the plurality of KPIs and collected data that differ depending on the brands. Here, we mainly see two scenarios: 

• Agencies that are used to launching CRMs to be able to report the data their clients ask for. Costly and time-consuming, these custom developments weigh down the business model and, in the worst cases, turn into complex white elephants. Not to mention the field reps managing different accounts who find themselves reporting on different tools... ;

• Agencies that avoid the tools debate and deliver data in Excel format (or similar), leaving clients to manage the data integration on their own (if they indeed have a CRM!). 

Neither of these options is really suitable: they are neither profitable for you, nor satisfactory for your clients.

You therefore need to be fast and flexible, which will undoubtedly improve your conversion rate! The solution is to opt for a SaaS CRM (or web software) in order to quickly deploy your client accounts. The benefit: client account creation in a few clicks, launching a mission and setup (with data ready for integration) in a short time, and ultra-fast monitoring/extraction of performance data.

By opting for a mobile CRM focused on retail distribution, you allow your field reps to complete their shelf inventory reports in an ultra-fast, intuitive manner with tailored business and brand forms configured in advance based on the data to be collected. Gone are the days when your salespeople scattered across a multitude of tools, data, and reports: they only have to open their app in-store and work on the forms relevant to the brands in their portfolio!

Your new CRM allows you to both achieve your clients' sales goals and your own profitability goals.

‍

In addition, your sales agency's CRM must allow reporting automation: in just a few clicks, you design results-tracking templates that address your clients' challenges. Once these templates are ready, generating monthly reports is instantaneous.

Finally, the sales software used by your team must work with a maximum number of integrations (third-party applications) and interface easily with the client's existing workflows. Since triggering sales and orders directly impacts their logistics, your CRM must be able to interact with the specific business processes and other tools used by manufacturers. The ideal is to use a SaaS CRM with an open API, in order to develop the necessary integrations according to the client's software.

To help you choose your future CRM/SFA, we have listed the key criteria in specifications documents and conducted a comparison of market solutions for sales agencies. 

Now that we have explored the organizational and technological aspects, let's look at sales efficiency. To help you win your next clients, Sidely offers a list of 10 pain points for manufacturers selling in retail, which you can transform into selling points!

‍

10 key arguments that sales agencies can highlight to brands

As an outsourced sales force agency in retail, you have many assets to convince brands to trust you:

1. Industry expertise: highlight your deep knowledge of the retail sector, including market trends, competition, and consumer preferences;

2. Highly qualified team: emphasize the skill and experience of your sales reps, showing your ability to effectively represent partner brands;

3. Geographical coverage: highlight the reach of your sales team and show that you are capable of expanding the client company's network, whether in terms of geographic areas, chains, or individual retail outlets; 

4. Flexibility: showcase your ability to adapt quickly to market changes and your clients' strategic shifts; 

5. Technology and innovation: emphasize the use of modern technologies to optimize operations, improve product visibility, and provide quality analytical data. At Sidely, this is one of our creeds: to offer you an app that boosts your performance and that of your clients. Ready to make a change?

6. Proven results: present case studies and concrete examples of past or current success, demonstrating your ability to generate tangible results for the brands you represent. Non-disclosure agreements do not prevent you from producing anonymized charts highlighting highly sought-after statistics: numeric distribution, weighted distribution etc. ;

7. Relationships with retailers: emphasize your close relationships with major retail chains, showing that you can negotiate advantageous deals for the brands you represent;

8. Continuous training: value the continuous training cycles you offer to your team of mobile field sales reps;

9. Transparent communication: highlight your commitment to clear communication with partner brands and reassure them by explaining how information will be shared and reported; 

10. Return on investment (ROI): show how your agency can maximize the brands' profitability. Various KPIs can be convincing: comparing the cost of an internal salaried sales rep to that of an external sales rep, or making a projection based on the client's current performance. For example, if they achieve a turnover of X across 20 outlets, estimate the turnover achieved across 30 by the end of the campaign, etc. 

‍

Succeeding in the implementation phase of the collaboration is particularly strategic for you, as profitability increases significantly right after. Indeed, the greatest efforts in training and adaptation take place at the beginning of the contract. Once your sales agents master the client's environment, meetings, debriefs, and reports become less frequent, and the field conversion rate increases. Furthermore, if the collaboration becomes solid and the client sees an attractive ROI, they have no reason to turn back or start recruiting internal mobile sales reps again. On the contrary, they are likely to progressively increase the service level!

‍

With these different keys, you should be able to improve the profitability of your sales agency specializing in retail sales.