Creating Field Force Evolution

Your company invested the time and resources to review the field force foundations – talent assessment, leadership development and team development. By now, your company should be experiencing increased revenue, higher associate retention and lowered expenses. However, if you played defense (only focusing internally) and your company still isn’t at the desired levels, it may be time to go on the offense. Evolution focuses on finding new team members by properly aligning your company’s field force territories for profit and efficiency, developing new candidate personas and engaging in a new talent acquisition approach.

Field Force Evolution is the second installment in a three-part blog series identifying common approaches to stabilize and improve field force organization. This process focuses on your company’s profits and expenses, so building properly aligned territories will improve travel efficiency, lower expenses and increase associate retention.

Candidate Personas –

Having properly aligned your field structure and territory alignment, companies will transition to finding the right candidates in the right location. Sophisticated recruiting tools allow for more in-depth targeting than ever! If your outbound marketing builds a target persona, you already understand the value of building a candidate persona.

In partnership with your leadership team and automotive industry best practices, consultants perform competency-based card stacks to narrow your talent search in new ways. Inspired by The Birkman Method – Your Personality at Work to pinpoint psychological traits needed for your field force’s role successes, Wirthy consultants generate custom, one-off candidate personas to ensure proper targeting for today and the future.

Your unique field force requires custom candidate identification or your company risks repeating historical hiring practices.

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Structure Territory / Alignment

Structure / Territory Alignment –

Your company’s revenue is tied to effective to field force travel. Creating efficient travel plans allows for the team members to in front of clients more often. Outside consultants provide unique value to review existing territories without the bias of the status quo to help build the most efficient and profitable travel plans.

The factors used to initially plan your field force structure and territories may have changed over time. Companies transition among outside sales teams to traditional hybrid (account manage and sales) systems and eventually to a customer success model. As companies mature, typically client clusters become dominant requiring enterprise or auto dealer group models.

Consultants assess and balance client count, required OEM or dealership contact rate KPIs, unique localized geographic challenges (rivers, mountains, etc.), territory revenue, automotive dealer groups and employee locations to help prepare a fresh take on territory distribution. Proper territory alignment will generate greater field force efficiency leading to increased revenue and employee retention.

Each territory can be mapped, and the field force generates a sample calendar to generate budget-saving, travel efficiencies.

Sample Google Map Territory Planning

Properly aligned territories also reveals potential blind spots like geographic areas where your company is missing key personnel. Identifying staffing pitfalls, sets up the need to find candidates to fill the hole. Any candidate could do, but effective HR leadership and consultants should build candidate personas to find the right candidate skillsets, geographic locations and motivations.

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Sample Wirthy Candidate Persona

After the consultant and your company establish the new geographic territories and candidate persona, transition to finding talent to build your team. HR Generalists could greatly improve your company’s existing internal recruiting; however, generalists aren’t specialists in the unique idiosyncrasies of the automotive field force norms. Partnering with an industry expert speeds up qualified candidate identification and shortens the time to fill open requisitions.

Talent Acquisition –

Activating your company’s customized Candidate Persona an automotive industry field force expert will be produce immediate results. Consultants approach recruiting differently than HR Generalists – they focus on skillsets not geography. With thousands of auto industry connections and an original take LinkedIn recruiting, Wirthy delivers auto-experienced, qualified candidates in no time!

Candidates are fully vetted via Wirthy’s proprietary pre-screen checklist. Structured pre-screens are better than generalist recruiting in three ways:

• An experienced auto field rep insider explains the role – the upside, challenges and solutions
• Pre-identifies administrative and product challenges that challenge existing team members
• Methods to maximize the pay plan

Marketing or consultants should activate no-cost, organic posts for roles on LinkedIn. Small investments in LinkedIn Sponsored InMail and Sponsored Ads allow consultants to scale outreach and speed up the time to hire.

Previous Wirthy LinkedIn Sponsored Ads

Field Force Improvement Evolution –

Congrats! Your company moved from defense to offense to address your field force challenges. With the best team in place, close the loop by addressing internal process improvements, conduct improved product and sales training while developing accountability with product and sales certification.