It has been observed that there is a certain level of mistrust between a company’s management and it’s sales team tracking app. This is more prominent in smaller-sized companies where the owner himself is heading most of the business operations.
For smaller business owners GPS in a mobile phone is something which they love to use extensively.
Getting real time location of your field sales can give a feeling of assurance rather than wondering if it’s a problem with the sales team or something else.
For industries like FMCG, where the salesmen have to cover at least 40 outlets in a day, the knowledge that a salesman has visited the outlets is very substantial. A retailer has only a small budget that he can use to buy products. Any FMCG salesman who doesn’t visit an outlet will lose the market to a rival company. Retailers, in general, like to stock only those items whose supplies are regular.
With time these companies can evaluate the outlets based on their orders. But before this evaluation takes place, it’s important to know if the salesmen are visiting the outlets or not. Otherwise, the evaluation will be error-prone.
A mobile salesman tracking app running on a cheap Android phone/tablet can easily determine the location of the sales staff tracking app as well as the route he had taken. Such sales person tracking app should have a mechanism of automatically switching on the location tracking either at a particular time of the day or based on the salesperson’s attendance.
Also, the mobile SFA app should not drain out the battery quickly. In a real life environment, the location of a sales person would not change for 10-15 mins. So any employee location tracking app information finer than this would not serve a purpose. In turn it will drain the salesperson’s phone’s battery.
