The food and beverage industry says it has no clarity – REPORT

Team Skynamo

02 December 2021

Skynamo – the leading provider of field sales technology – carried out extensive research recently. Spanning hundreds of manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors around the world, all with field sales teams, several pertinent challenges and successes were revealed over the course of the year.

The resultant Field Sales Benchmark Report for 2021 gives some interesting insights into how the Food and Beverage industry’s sales teams compare. It looked at common industry-specific challenges, the technology used, and sales rep productivity.

But that was not enough for Skynamo. They added insight from their well-known Industry Thermometer to reveal even more insights into the food and beverage industry.

Here are some of the highlights:

Food & Bev is Skyrocketing

The Skynamo Thermometer reflects growth of over 435% in the food and beverage industry, since October 2020.

The Skynamo Thermometer monitored over 1,000 companies across 26 industry segments, and in October, the graph continued its steady climb, showing further growth since January 2021.

The food and beverage industry has already surpassed the sum of the average value of total orders per customer converted in 2020, in July of this year.

ERP vs CRM

The benchmark report reveals that, in the food and beverage industry, the most popular enterprise resource planning system (ERP) used is SAGE.

While it was found that the majority of businesses in this industry did not have a customer relationship management solution (CRM) in place, Skynamo’s survey revealed that of the food and beverage respondents that answered to having a CRM in place, mostly use a combination of paper, email, Excel and WhatsApp as their CRM software.

Challenges that slow sales down

When Skynamo asked business owners, sales managers, and reps in the food and beverage industry across South Africa, the US, and the UK about the biggest challenges in their daily work, they revealed two key issues. First, they couldn’t see what their sales teams were doing in the field. Second, they felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of manual administrative work they had to handle each day.

How you doin’? It’s time to find out.

We recommend downloading the full report. Find out how your field sales team and technology compare to other manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors from around the world.