New Research Reveals The Substantial Time Drain Facing FMCG Sales Managers

DATE: 29 March, 2021 // BACK TO ARCHIVE »

New research has revealed that many FMCG sales managers in the UK and Ireland are spending over a quarter of their working day handling, manipulating and analysing the data they require for their roles, with the repetitive nature of many tasks resulting in significant missed opportunity costs.

In a study conducted by independent market research company PCP Consulting, on behalf of Talysis Ltd, the results show that many organisations do not have defined data personnel, with 83% of sales managers and 100% of sales directors manipulating, analysing, and visualising their organisation’s data themselves.

In addition, 68% of those interviewed are using at least three different sources of data (most commonly sales, financial and promotional data). 73% of sales managers and 87% of sales directors combine these data sources themselves to achieve more refined insights. The result of which is 45% of sales management personnel spending two or more hours a day working on data, equating to 12 entire working weeks every year.

Significantly, over two thirds of those interviewed said this time was spent on repetitive data tasks. Thus suggesting, that with smarter data management, this time could be reduced.

The importance sales teams place on data is unequivocal. The explosion of data now available, from different sources and with increased granularity, has the potential to deliver deeper and more sophisticated insights and understanding of brand and category performance than ever before. Yet, in tandem, its management is both more complex and time-consuming, leaving less time for turning this insight into tangible action.

For sales teams, the question is, is this time spent on data administration the best possible use of time? Or could this time be better spent on other value adding opportunities – whether it’s turning the data insights into actions, relationships with customers or developing team members?

What’s more, according to a Perkbox 2018 UK Workplace Stress Survey, Sales was the largest sector to experience the most amount of work-related stress, with the top two causes cited as having too much work and working too long hours. Identifying ways to streamline data management, and finding efficiencies, is a key area which could have a huge impact on both workload and time spent at work.

“The extent to which sales managers and directors are spending time on data administration tasks came as a surprise even to us as retail data specialists,” said Ed Roberts, Talysis Managing Director. “The fact that many of these data tasks are repetitive – occurring week in week out – indicates that there are clear efficiencies businesses must make in order for sales teams to spend their time effectively, empowering them to focus on more value adding actions.”

Cost-effective solutions such as data automation are becoming increasingly widespread. Services such as those provided by Data Revolution enable organisations to out-source their raw data, from multiple sources, it is then returned to them exactly how they need it in user-friendly ready-to-go formats.

 
Notes to editors: Talysis Ltd are experts in retail data in the UK and Ireland. Data Revolution is a sister company to Talysis Ltd providing data automation out-sourcing services.