With an internal or in-house field team, alignment towards a common goal is easy (okay, maybe easier). You’re probably extending your in-house tools and platforms. They are part of corporate engagement programs. Have visibility of their goals.

Does this apply to your outsourced sales team? Teams standing in multi-brand outlets (MBOs), large format retails (LFRs).

How do you keep them aligned to a common goal? And, how do you make them feel like they are part of a larger team?

Here are a few problems that you’re probably facing and a few ideas to overcome them.

With an outsourced team that’s managed by different agencies and geographical managers, you’ll need to create a common engagement program that binds them all. This program could include aspects such as learning, contests, special schemes, along with updates from corporate.

The intent of such an engagement program is to create a unifying platform that gives two-way visibility. For the frontline, they know what’s new with the company. For the company, it gives visibility on field-level engagement with the brand.

It’s probably your route trainers or ASMs conducting the occasion training. Worse still, they may be sharing content (learning or corporate info) over messaging tools such as WhatsApp.

This isn’t sustainable. Why? Because, it isn’t measurable (or at least, it isn’t easy to measure.)

Try creating a common channel that covers your entire outsourced frontline. All communication, learning or otherwise, needs to be fed in through this channel. This will also assist you in measuring training impact easily.

Daily templated WhatsApp messages with targets cannot be tracked. Both by the frontline team and the reviewer.

You will need a constant channel where frontline personnel can view their sales targets at any time in the day and view their performance against this target.

The more personnel you provide target/goal visibility to, the more aligned towards the larger goal they get.

When trying to engage, train, motivate your outsourced sales team, try to create a unifying engagement program and theme. All activities within this program should be measurable and designed to enable the frontline personnel to perform better.

Deliver this program through a super accessible channel. That provides you with all the data points you need to measure engagement and impact.

This is where Bsharp can help you. If you need a unified platform to help with your team’s learning, performance and reporting needs, we’d be more than happy to assist you in setting up a free pilot for 100 users, for 2 months.