Capability: Workforce Scheduling

Using the Right Tools

Many businesses embarking on a journey to optimise their field sales teams have a defined strategy for the task. They understand what is required and how they can achieve their business’s goals. But what they don’t have is the right tool to make that strategy work and to achieve their business goals.

However, when you’ve been given a set of objectives to achieve without an action-oriented strategy to support you, it gets a little tricky. You have an idea of the broad direction in which you would like to head but your strategy lacks the data-driven and methodical approach to guarantee success. In plain terms, you’re working in the dark.

How do you really know what success looks like? How do you measure getting things right? How do you compare options, when manually creating just one version of the ‘future’ can take a day or two?

How do you deliver the goals that have been set out? And how do you know that your solution to that goal is the most efficient, and not just one of many possibilities?

That’s where our Field Force Planning consultancy services come into play.

Consultancy

CACI consultants provide a valuable partnership, whether you license our tools or not. Many of the consultancy projects we deliver are where companies choose not to go down the software route due to the resource, timescales, or lack of internal expertise.

Manually attempting to recut territories can take weeks, if not months of resource, time and effort. And when you lack the resource or expertise in-house, outsourcing the work to CACI can be just the right option.

We expertly guide clients to define an action plan and then work to execute that impartially and agilely.

The Biggest Benefit for Mondelez International from the Use of CACI is the Ability to Translate Our Strategic Plan Into a Concrete Action Plan.

Impartiality

Impartiality is key to the success of many of our projects. Some of the toughest emotional changes you must make when managing a field sales team, especially as we endure a global pandemic and businesses are looking at cost saving, are around downsizing or merging teams.

Having those difficult decisions taken out of your hands gives you objectivity and security in knowing that you made the right call and ensures that every decision point is transparent and fair.

Watch this space for an upcoming blog post about making structural changes to your field sales teams.

An Objective Third Party

Last year, one of our clients had a very detailed field sales territory reorganisation to tackle, which involved the merging of two large teams into a single team, and a reduction in headcount.

As a long-standing partner, we understood the sensitive, delicate nature of the project and the amount of change that the reorganisation would require. We helped them understand exactly how big the new team should be to achieve their RTM strategy and how staff could be assigned new territories in the fairest way.

This required a level of transparency and data-led decision-making only possible through an objective third party and sophisticated optimisation tools.

A project such as this is highly sensitive and requires a certain amount of discretion. Our consultants are experts in utilising the data and technology required to deliver the project in an impartial and professional manner. By leveraging the Field Force Planning team’s expertise, our client was able to remove any bias and make decisions validated by data, not emotion.

Is a Self-Service Approach the Most Effective Option?

Alongside the complexity of the project, there can be several reasons why you would choose a consultancy project rather than a self-service approach.

Ultimately, consultative expertise can enable increased flexibility, compartmentalisation of multiple projects and take away the pain of difficult decision-making (read more about this here).

CACI will be able to challenge your assumptions of your project and make sure you are able to define a workable, achievable strategy to measure the success of your project.

Nestlé Australia, worked with the team at CACI, initially on a consultancy basis, to perform two major pieces of work (view our customer story here).

I had the opportunity of working closely with the team at CACI on a large project that lasted over six months…the results have been extremely positive, highlighting how we can do more with less when we operate a lean and efficient team. With the expertise that we have developed, we are now using the software…to drive further efficiencies through our non-grocery business.

Speak to an Expert

At CACI we help teams with field force management on a daily basis, and over the past 30 years we’ve worked with organisations all over the world to add transparency and certainty to this balancing act.

Get in touch with us here to leverage the expertise of our consultants the next time you reorganise your territories or if you’d like to find out more about our Field Force Planning consultancy services.

The 9 Critical Risk Factors

If you’re poised to push the button on a field force reduction programme or you’re considering your options to control costs in a post-Covid world, make sure you’ve considered these 9 critical risk factors before you take action.

These are challenging times for brands, retailers, field merchandising and field sales organisations. Commercial pressures and dramatically changed consumer behaviours and motivations have thrown established business models into question. In field force strategy, planning and operations, it’s no surprise that downsizing to reduce costs is under consideration for many organisations.

We get it. Field forces are expensive – in our clients’ experience it can cost around £72K per head to put a single rep on the road. Training, travel costs and salaries add up. The pandemic has brought these costs under intense scrutiny.

There’s also pressure to shift field force resources to other channels. Field reps are not the only way to influence retail sales – alternative and potentially cheaper channels include telesales, digital, crowdsourcing and outsourcing.

With lower sales volumes and a high cost to serve, a regular and comprehensive field visit programme is beginning to look prohibitively expensive for some companies. Some clients tell us they’re looking at field force reduction because individual or entire channels of outlets have closed due to Covid-19. Others report that every division is being asked to make specific savings or percentage overhead reductions.

If you manage a field force or are responsible for the direction and strategy of field merchandising and field sales, we urge you to take a closer look before you take action. There’s certainly an opportunity to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your field teams, but it might not be in the way you think.

Here’s What You Need to Consider:

If reductions are needed, you must be certain that you’re making them in the right places, so you’re not cutting off vital sales and profit opportunities at the same time.

1.The Current Situation as a Fact

Justifying change to individuals – and other stakeholders such as HR – is easiest when you have objective evidence. Clients often approach us with strong beliefs about the size and structure of their field sales team. They see a very different picture once they’ve reviewed an objective analysis. You need an accurate, factual view of the status quo before you can decide how best to change it.

2. Geographic Optimisation for a Leaner Field Force

Fewer heads in the field team means resource is spread more thinly, which will likely mean more driving. Do you decide to focus on more easily accessible metropolitan areas and leave further-flung outlets uncovered? What will the impact be on market share and sales performance? If your reps are used to a regular weekly or fortnightly visit schedule, is there a better way to deal with geographical outliers? You need to assess the impact of reducing visits – it may be greater than you think.

3. Enhancing Visit Focus and Frequency

With fewer heads, you could cover the same number of stores with a reduced visit frequency. It might mean more driving for reps, and proportionally less time spent in-store. It might also lead to a decrease in sales because of a lack of engagement. You need performance data and market information to assess where you can afford to make these adjustments.

Simplifying your contact strategy can have a big impact on call rates: our research amongst clients shows that adding a second tier of visit frequency typically increased team driving time by 20%.

4. Rebalancing the Mix of Outlet Support

You could move less lucrative outlets off the field sales roster, handing them over to other methods of contact, or set up to alternate rep visits in person with phone calls. But which will be the most effective – and cost-effective – approaches? How do you match digital, telesales or outsourced support provision with the individual retailer or catchment type? You need insight that helps you categorise outlets in terms of risk and opportunity and provides evidence for the best way to change your visit strategy.

5. Balancing Territories

Once you’ve decided how many people you need in your rebalanced team, how do you best carve up the geography? Having the right number of people is only the first step to creating a good territory structure. You also need to allocate geography to balance workload. Workload isn’t just about in-store activity: it also includes driving. Reps with more remote territories can’t achieve the same level of calls as those in more compact territories. You need to navigate the road network ultra-efficiently, giving your reps routes that help them spend as little time in the car as possible.

6. Recruitment and Rep Locations

You need to weigh up physical location as well as experience and skillsets. Studies show that reps can reduce their commute time by 43% if they live in an optimal location for the territory. This helps them achieve better work-life balance, maintaining engagement and performance in challenging times. But what if the people who live in the right place are not your best performing reps? You need to review the impact of adjusting territories to accommodate more skilled sales personnel. Ideally, recruit candidates for vacant territories who are based in a convenient area, and know who is prepared to relocate before you make key changes.

7. Skills Transfer

If you’re consolidating teams and territories, you need to audit people’s skills against your business requirement. Capability and high performance in one channel does not necessarily translate into another channel: there may be a retraining cost and you may lose strong team members who don’t want to reskill. Increasing reps’ remits could reduce success and impact in their previous areas of focus. Before you make these kinds of changes, you need to make a realistic assessment of the likely effect on the bottom line.

8. Economies of Scale

Mergers, acquisitions and liquidations are all possible scenarios in the current climate. This could put more products into the field force brief and present the opportunity to merge multiple sales teams, to avoid reps from each entity going to the same places. As some channels fail and others prosper, you may want to switch resource from the struggling channel to address opportunities in thriving markets. There are economies of scale from removing duplication of in-store activity, while more heads will mean less driving. Our research has shown that merging teams may create a single team 10% smaller than the combined entities, with 20% less driving overall.

9. Building in Resilience and Agility

How long will Covid-19 continue to impact retail and brand performance? It’s a question no-one can answer for sure. Jettisoning people now might make for a healthier bottom line in the short term, but as the months unfold, going too far and too fast could prove a fatal mistake for brands and retailers. As the market recovers, it will be hard to seize the opportunity if brands and sales operations have to embark on a costly and time-consuming recruitment exercise and factor in time for a newly minted team to achieve its potential. Lost revenue and competitiveness will far outweigh the earlier short-term saving.

We recommend a phased approach, with a low-impact short term option that can be implemented relatively easily. Scope out more radical options to keep on the back burner, so you’re prepared in case you need to go further and deeper.

Moving Forward With Your Field Force: What to do Next

Size does matter in the field: you need reach and resources to compete effectively. What’s vital is focusing on profitable priorities and maintaining an agile field force that can adapt to fast-changing circumstances. You need accurate information so you can manage risks and understand the likely impact on your business and brand performance in the short and medium terms.

If you urgently need to make decisions about the size of your field force, you’ll need robust data insight and evidence to reform effectively. The CACI field force team can help you make a rapid and reliable evaluation of your options, based on your unique performance data along with the latest market data and insights.

Access Free, Strategic Expert Advice For Field Operators

We’re offering a free initial ‘Coming back from Covid’ consultation for field sales and field merchandising, to help you move forward at pace. Share your current situation and challenges and we can help you take the first steps to map a route to an agile and profitable field operation fit for the current environment. Get in touch with us for more and to book your free consultation.

We have reached the end of our effective field force journey having covered a lot of ground. If you have missed any of the previous entries in this series you can find them via the links below:

• Generalists or specialists
• Utilisation of field sales teams
• Fair and balanced territories
• The link between recruitment and commuting
• Frequency patterns and travel times
• Rigid scheduling and driving

And so we move on to our final finding, and this revolves around the ability of a rep to produce an efficient route around the calls on their territory.

Over the last 30 years, the phrase we have heard more than any other is “my reps know their patches best”. A challenge is always welcome, so, time and time again, we have been willing to pit our route optimiser against the route put together manually by a rep. One thing we always had confidence in is the size of the task a rep is being asked to perform. Take a fairly trivial example of asking a rep to take a single day of 10 calls and schedule those calls in the most efficient order – there are more than 3.6 million potential solutions. Expecting a rep to factor in speeds and junction delays on the road network for every street and junction right across their territory, and use this information to get the single best schedule, is hopelessly unrealistic.

A schedule of 10 calls in a single day has more than 3.6 million permutations

Not surprisingly, we have never seen a rep match the optimiser yet. In fact, the data shows that, even if we keep calls on the same day as the rep did and just optimise the daily sequence, the schedules produced by reps mean, on average, 16% more time stuck behind the wheel than is necessary. Allowing calls to be scheduled on a different day takes this excessive driving up even further. All time the sales rep could be spending doing the job they were employed to do: sell!

Optimising the visit sequence of a day reduces drivetime by 16%

As with all of our principles, it is clear that technology can deliver huge savings in travel time and mileage (as well as greenhouse gas emissions). Not only that, it offers the ability to achieve more calls with the same headcount or the same coverage with fewer heads. If you would like to know how to sell more at lower cost, please contact us. CACI would be more than happy to help you identify exactly what efficiency savings can be achieved with your own field sales team and help you determine the best strategy, structure and schedule for your field sales operation.

We’ve now covered:

• Separating teams into generalists or specialists
• Optimising the utilisation of field sales teams
• Developing fair and balanced territories
• The link between recruitment and commuting
• Frequency patterns and travel times

Our penultimate piece of insight centres on the impact of calling on stores at completely fixed intervals compared with allowing an element of flexibility. When we talk to prospects about how they like to schedule their calls, the default answer is that they want calls to be rigidly phased. For example, if a call has to happen twice in a 4-week cycle and the first call is scheduled for Monday of Week 1, then the second call will inevitably fall on Monday of Week 3. The main reason for doing this seems to be to ensure store owners and managers know when the rep will call next.

However, is it really necessary for things to be that precise? How about, using the example above, if the calls were about, but not exactly, 2 weeks apart from each other?

Having totally rigid phasing of visits puts real constraint on the ability to be efficient. As anybody who has ever been involved in optimisation theory will tell you, constraints and efficiency don’t get along that well. This is especially true when you add in other diary events, such as holidays and team meetings. These can create an ‘echo effect’ through a person’s diary when coupled with rigid phasing of calls.

So, how about if we said that this second call could happen on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of Week 3? We would still be about 2 weeks apart but we would have many more possible options for scheduling that call, and almost certainly a more efficient outcome. As the statistic shows, a bit of flexibility can cut driving by 14% – this could easily be an extra call each and every day!

Allowing visits to be scheduled 3 days out of phase create a 14% drivetime reduction

We’ll conclude this series with a look at routing and the comparison between a rep versus algorithm in producing the most optimised solution.

We have now explored generalists and specialists in your sales team, the utilisation of your field sales team, developing fair and balanced territories and the link between recruitment and commuting.

It is now time to focus on frequency patterns and the impact they have on the travelling required to adhere to them when creating routes.

It is absolutely right that some customers are worth visiting more often than others, but how granular do you need to go on this? We often see data where a company’s reps have 8 or 9 different frequency patterns. Trying to create a sensible route around these types of contact strategies is very challenging, and often illogical, with calls right next to each other not being made in sync. The inevitable impact being much more driving than necessary.

Our experience tells us that the revenue benefits of having more than 3 different frequency patterns are far outweighed by the travel costs (both in time and fuel) incurred in implementation. As an example, if you are operating an 8-week cycle, is there any real benefit from having weekly, fortnightly, monthly and 8-weekly visits, or would having, say, just weekly, fortnightly and 8-weekly visits have any significant impact on revenues? If not, make the move to the latter, cutting your fuel costs and enabling your reps to increase the number of calls they do every day.

Increasing call frequency patterns increases travel time between visits by 19-67%

Our penultimate entry in this series looks at the impact of a rigid schedule on drive time.

In previous articles we’ve discussed if your sales reps should be generalists or specialists, the utilisation of your sales team and developing fair and balanced territories.

Now, we’re going to address the link between smart recruitment and commuting. Historically, the amount of commuting a rep does at the start and end of each day has been viewed as pretty much irrelevant; it is just something a rep has had to withstand and cope with. Even to the point of opting out of legislation that sought to acknowledge, measure and limit it.

Well, in the words of the reluctant Nobel prize winner, Bob Dylan, times are a changin’. Whether it will be in the light of recent court judgements (such as one involving Tyco at the European Court of Justice), or simply that society and, to some extent, companies themselves are seeing the benefits of employees having a better work-life balance, a sales rep having to do a large slice of ‘invisible’ work is getting less and less acceptable by the day.

So, if we are going to start including commuting in a rep’s working hours, what does that mean for their employer? Well, probably that they are likely to need a bigger sales force if they want to keep calling on all their customers with the current contact strategy. Or maybe it will mean having to slice and dice the call file, with lower-value and more remote customers no longer receiving a visit.

Given that this might well jeopardise sales revenues, it is certain that any company will want to mitigate the impact of commuting. Which is why the following statistic is so compelling – that is that the impact of recruiting in the wrong location can lead to sales reps having to commute a whopping 43% more than if we can recruit them in the ideal location – the average was actually just over 30%.

Recruiting in ideal locations can reduce commute driving by 43%

Now, we are not saying that we are living in an ideal world where we can just recruit a great salesperson in an ideal location. However, next time you have a vacancy, rather than take the easy option of recruiting their replacement in the same vicinity as your leaver, why not do some proper analysis? Consider the passage of time, churn in your customer base, attrition in your sales team, and changes in the road network. Could the easy option also be a very costly one?

The next part of this series will focus on frequency patterns and travel times.

We’re on to our third principle of effective field force planning – the first being generalists or specialists, and the second; utilisation of field sales teams.

Principle 3 is about workload balance – in an ideal world, all your field sales reps would be working the same hours. Our experience, based on analysing thousands of existing territory structures, is that this goal is very, very rarely (if ever) achieved without using sophisticated software.

In fact, the average territory workload imbalance is 18% – in real terms, for those territories that are 18% overworked, this is the equivalent of them trying to squeeze 6 days’ work into 5 days. This can only lead to a potentially nasty cocktail of long hours, frustrated customers and high staff turnover. For those at the other end of the spectrum, at 18% underworked, they will be paid a full wage whilst only being effective for 4 days each week, which obviously means they could be doing more calls and selling more product. Given these outcomes, it is hardly surprising that in a 2018 study by CACI, correcting these imbalances of +/-18% enables 4.5% more calls to be achieved – yes, it’s a huge problem!

Before companies engage with CACI their field base teams are about 18% imbalanced

So, how do we end up with territory imbalance? Well, the single biggest factor is a lack of appreciation, and measurement, of how much driving a sales rep needs to do in their patch. Companies will often share out calls between territories such that each territory has the same number of visits to do, and believe that this will deliver a balanced workload across their team. Unfortunately, the nature of road networks and geography (in every country around the world) will mean that some territories will have a much higher component of driving within their working day, and vice versa. So what initially appeared balanced is suddenly completely imbalanced!

Trying to understand road networks is not a trivial challenge. A country’s road networks will often contain more than a million separate stretches of road and a similar number of junctions. Roads operate at very different speeds too, and junctions have very different delay times – it’s enough to blow your mind, and certainly too much to think about.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that you can’t expect balanced territories and enjoy the benefits associated with equitable workloads without having the tools in place to understand how much driving every single rep in your team is likely to rack up.

In the next blog we’ll look at the next principle of effective field force planning – the link between recruitment and commuting.

In part one of this blog series we discussed whether you can optimise your field sales team by splitting them into generalists and/or specialists. This second instalment looks at the next principle – the level of utilisation we see companies’ sales teams operating at.

Sometimes we see companies that are expecting too much from their field sales teams, with workloads up to 110% of the time a rep has available! This is clearly impossible – unsurprisingly, these companies typically have a very high level of staff attrition, and disgruntled customers. More commonly, companies have field sales teams that are underused, often being busy for as little as 60% of their day. Why would a company pay their reps a full-time wage when they are really only effective part-time?Now, CACI isn’t advocating aiming for 100% utilisation (when we talk about utilisation, we are including time in call, time driving and also lunch, administration, team meetings etc) – this is unrealistic. Calls don’t always go to plan, so a bit of contingency is sensible – our experience suggests a utilisation between 90-95% of a salesperson’s day is achievable. As mentioned earlier, we regularly see teams that are very much underworked and, less often, teams that are being asked to do more than is possible. However, the average level of utilisation before working with CACI is, as shown in the graphic, only 80% – this is quite a gap from what is possible, and means companies could be doing more calls with their existing team or the same call levels with a lower headcount – sell more, or save money, that’s your call!

Before companies engage with CACI their field teams are approximately 80% utilised

The next blog will look at the challenge of developing fair and balanced territories.