Field Sales Is Far From Dead - It's Evolving

speaker-0: Field sales has been declared dead or dying for more than a decade, but in wholesale distribution, it remains one of the most important drivers of customer relationships and revenue growth. In this episode of the MDM Amplify podcast, I'm joined by JT Rimby, Senior Vice President of Business Development at MapMyCustomers, to talk about why outside sales is still thriving and how distributors are getting smarter about territory management. account segmentation, and sales execution.

We dig into the biggest inefficiencies holding field sales teams back today, why traditional CRMs have often failed outside reps, and how distributors are using data, routing technology, and mobile first tools to improve productivity without sacrificing relationships. JT also shares insights from recent research identifying three distinct types of field sales reps and what separates top performers from everyone else. Plus, we discuss the ongoing challenge of tribal knowledge, succession planning for veteran reps, and how distributors can better preserve customer intelligence for the next generation of sales teams.

Enjoy. JT, thanks for joining the MDM Amplify podcast. speaker-1: Thanks for having me, my big fan of MDM and NAW. You guys do it right.

Really grateful to be here. speaker-0: Appreciate it. Well, let's start off with an intro to first who you are and your background, and then a little bit about who my customers is in terms of what it does and who it serves. speaker-1: That's great.

So personally, I'm married to a fantastic woman named Summer for the last 19 years. She's amazing. We have five awesome sons, 14, 12, 11, 10, and eight. We live in sweet chaos in Bozeman, Montana.

We're big Pittsburgh Steelers fans. Love the game of golf and all things hiking, fishing, all things outdoors with my sons. I come from Salesforce. I know the CRM space very, very well.

I traveled way too much with Salesforce. Given the family is my priority, we made a change, obviously there. But been at Matt and my customers for just over five and a half years now. I've done a lot of ride-alongs with outside sales reps in those last five and a half years.

And it's given me a great passion and respect for the responsibilities on outside sales rep shoulders. I just made a switch within Matt and my customers as the head of sales to the SVP of business development, where I now focus specifically on partner channels. and referrals from our awesome customer base. Background about my customers quickly.

We are a sales execution arm. Think mobile first, ease of use and value for outside sales reps. speaker-0: Pretty simple there. Well, really diving in here, field sales has always been a core part of distribution, but it's also one of the hardest areas for them to optimize.

So from your perspective, you've seen and lived a lot of this. What are the biggest inefficiencies holding these teams back today? speaker-1: Yeah, look, forgive me for chuckling here, but when I started, Mike, at Matt and my customers, this is one of those things that kind of really caught me flat-footed and admittedly kind of gave me a nervous tick and drove me a little bit batty. You have these unbelievably successful companies run by fantastic people that do not leverage data strategically or well ⁓ at all.

So you fast forward to present day. This has actually become one of my most expected and now even endearing traits of the distribution space for me. ⁓ Family run businesses that have just done an unbelievable job of building foundational relationships that ultimately drive revenue in just a widely successful way. So as relationships being the foundation for driving revenue, the inefficiencies end up being around how to ensure those relationships are being nurtured.

So lots of different things here. Firstly, this is still a, like a massively pervasive epidemic. And I know that's, that's kind of dramatic, but the view in the distribution space is that CRMs are big brother. ⁓ in all of field sales, the world of outside sales, CRM became this like synonymous with, with a cuss word.

Reps hate it because it never provided value to the rep. It was built with leadership. so top down. ⁓ perspective, the world's largest CRMs were never designed for the way outside sales reps work.

They're admin heavy, they're not mobile optimized, and they're not easy to use. One of our larger customers just a few years ago admitted to coming on board with us because they said that, MapMyCustomers was not built for desk jockeys. We were made to keep their reps in the field and in front of their customers. So.

that look, I'm getting super long-winded, but long story short, distributors have been duped into believing that I like saying, calling them head sheets and spreadsheets, ⁓ and notebooks and the floorboards of car trucks are really the only serum that's possible for outside sales reps. Yeah. ⁓ I would close with kind of two things outside reps. need value, something that actually helps them provide for their family and helps them do their job.

Well followed immediately by ease of use. in a mobile first capacity. In summary, the greatest inefficiencies or the inability to optimize your field team most of the time exists because you've got the wrong set of tools in the first place. speaker-0: So much has changed in just the last few years when it comes to technology, business conditions, supply chain disruptions, but looking specifically at field sales here, what has changed in the past few years that's really made route planning and especially territory management more urgent or more complex for distributors and manufacturers to manage?

speaker-1: So I love the question, but I would go a step further and maybe not call it just route planning. I would combine those and call it a strategic plan of attack for a territory or for the total addressable market. I've been more encouraged specifically with NAW events where the likes of John Nantz of Redwood, for example, has done specific coaching sessions on account segmentation. That topic alone, Mike, account segmentation, the process of tiering accounts by revenue, margins, volumes, purchase history, opportunity size.

In short, it's helping reps know who to see and when to see them. Now, where I see distributors get it wrong or fall short, is that they spend so much time and money for that matter on parsing through these, these tiering out these systems. Only to have a finished product in a spreadsheet. then, then they take that territory spreadsheet and they, they attach it in an email and they send each territory to each individual rep in this spreadsheet.

And all we've done is, is handed the rep this, this massive amount of logistical administrative work to figure out where these accounts are in relation to each other so that they can form any semblance of a, of an efficient plan of attack. So. I'm encouraged by account segmentation, but it's just a step in the right direction. It hasn't gotten to the right destination yet.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's that segmentation, the science of it that I find so fascinating right now. And that's taken on such a huge platform of its own over the last, you could call it, you know, 10 to 15 years, but especially over the last three to four years as, as distributors are really getting more, I'll call it scientific about the way that they serve different customers. Even if they're spending, they might have three different customers spending each $80 million a year with them, but it's the way, the how that they're spending that 80 million.

That's all. That's what's fascinating here. speaker-1: This is going be a terrible analogy. ⁓ But if you think about our military, if the leaders only had the plan of attack on the enemy, but they never effectively or efficiently disseminate that plan of attack to the foot soldiers, the troops on the ground, the troops on the ground aren't going to be able to execute.

then leadership is going, well, this is where the bad guy is. Go get the bad guy. But the troops on the ground, the boots on the ground, didn't know how to get there effectively or efficiently or on time. So that's where MapMyCustomers can help bridge that account segmentation gap.

speaker-0: Excellent. It feels like we've been hearing about the quote unquote, the death of field sales for about at least 15 years. But amid the rise of inside sales, along with B2B customers gradual shift towards digital minded buying preferences, we know that field sales remains a critical part of most distributor sales organizations. So what has really enabled field sales to have this staying power after it was supposed to be dead a long time ago?

speaker-1: Yeah, look, I'm not going to come up with any earth shattering, ⁓ new revelation on this, but staying powers predicated on the relationships, relationships, build and maintain trust revenues driven by those relationships. And I would argue that there is zero substitute for when JT, the rep walks the halls of a customer, ⁓ in their building on their turf, ⁓ learning about upcoming needs or challenges. That's how you stay ahead or, upcoming. personnel changes.

You can't just wait until AI signals in the market come out. You're already late then. So by walking those hallways in person in a face-to-face manner, shaking hands, you learn about actual needs and upcoming preferences. Yeah.

speaker-0: Last year in 2025, Matt, my customers conducted some pretty extensive research that identified three types of field sales reps and did a really nice job of segmenting those out. Can you walk me through the, can you walk me through the high level results of that research and the attributes of those three types of reps and maybe their digital engagement level? speaker-1: So Mike, this was tied research to one of our favorite customers at my customers is Jasper Engines and Transmissions.

Much of the NAW group knows Joe McDonald, the EVP at Jasper. He's attended a lot of the NAW events. The goal there was to identify what good looks like. Joe and Jasper, they've done a wonderful job on the previous topic of account segmentation over the years.

While those account segmentation strategies were always clearly laid out, there ended up being three buckets of reps that we identified in this research. So you have low performers, mid performers, and then top performers. The low performers, they had low level of activities across all of their accounts. So essentially JT, the low level performer was seeing every single account in my territory patch.

at a very, very low volume. So I could not create a consistent, ⁓ repeatable relationship there. was going really, really broad. A quarter inch deep, the mid levels, they had high level of, of activity across all accounts.

So when you think about that, these guys were burning the wick at both ends. They were up super early in the morning. They were on the road and they were getting back late at night. ⁓ it produced results, but they certainly are not sustainable results.

these guys were the ones getting nervous ticks because they were, they were just busting it. They grew their territories, but not nearly as much as the top performers, top performers, hugely strategic. ⁓ they followed their tiered strategic account segmentation faithfully. They ended up with really high levels of engagement to the tune of two and a half.

X the number of activity across the top accounts. ⁓ but they ended up growing revenues over two times the low performers and 50 % more than the mid performers. This was literally smarter, not harder. We throw that around all the time.

⁓ so we've actually taken this a step further now to identify if JT, the rep start seeing a low level account rather than once a month, but moving it to every other month. We actually have data that says those low level accounts, the revenue is not going to drop there. So we're now repurposing that stop to somebody that has the ability to grow or expand. ⁓ and now on the flip side, if JT starts seeing this mid level account, two times a month versus one time a month, we're seeing revenues go up, product expansion, warranties being purchased, all sorts of different things.

In short, the goal is always how do we maximize every meeting with the right account? with the right person at the right time at the right frequency. And so that data is giving Jasper and Joe specifically the ability to say, look at the top performers, here's the mirror, reflect what they do. ⁓ And the results are really, really wonderful.

speaker-0: Smarter Not Harder seems to be the name of the game here. speaker-1: Yes, speaker-0: When companies get field sales planning right and the smarter, not harder, when they really put that to application, whether that's in routing, territory design, or account prioritization, what kind of measurable impact can they typically expect to see? speaker-1: I love this. Look, there's, there's both tangible and intangible benefits with this.

So, ⁓ number one, admin burdens are lifted dramatically. So, ⁓ on average six hours plus of admin work per week is eliminated per rep. reps get to stay in the field in front of customers rather than, than being stuck behind their laptop, putting notes in on a Friday afternoon with who they met with on a Monday morning. ⁓ real tangible numbers.

averages out to two additional stops or meetings or face-to-face meetings a day, 10 a week, 40 a month, over 400 a year. And if you do any math, if any of the distributors that might be listening do any math around the average revenue per meeting, that can turn out to some meaningful revenue lifts there. I'll tell you, one of our favorite things to do is to help re-engage house accounts. They're no longer assigned to a rep.

They're a former customer. You might have an inside sales rep calling on them once a month, but good grief, if I'm seeing a mid or a top tier account right down the road from a former customer and I have visibility that they're there, I should stop in and re-engage that relationship. One of my favorite ⁓ actual use cases with this is in a very tangible, meaningful way is we call it speed to first dollar for new reps. ⁓ If you just take into account the the cost of recruiting, interviewing, training, onboarding a new rep only to hand them a spreadsheet of 300 account you kind of pat them on the rear end and say, okay, JT, good luck, go, go get them.

We want you to see all these in person. Again, I've done is given them an exercise of logistic administrative work where, where we can point them in the right direction. Um, and it, dramatically reduces that ramp time and gives them incentives to get that first commission dollar. speaker-0: So it's not just bottom line, you know, sales meetings numbers.

I think that onboarding ⁓ component here is critical here too. So I'm glad you addressed that. speaker-1: It is. If I were to add one more thing, ⁓ oftentimes much of our customer base, we might actually get into this in a little bit, much of our customer base has your Salesforce's dynamics HubSpot already deployed within the org.

And we drive such high adoption with MountMyCustomers, those native integrations get data right back to that CRM of record. And so now you can be more informed to make more strategic decisions and know what good looks like across the organization. speaker-0: In this industry, a lot of distributors rely on tribal knowledge. Even as deep as we are into this digital transformation and leveraging data analytics, tribal knowledge is still a real thing here.

with field sales, there's reps who just really know their territory. They've known it for years, maybe decades. What are the biggest barriers to moving beyond that long time standard and how are companies really overcoming that? speaker-1: So before I answer that, I just want to take one moment and say, I greatly respect the men and the women that have been in their territories for 35 and 40 years.

And they, they have literally had an ownership mentality of this is my business. And what a blessing that's become to the distributors at, at, at, at any w. ⁓ now that said, I don't think of this as the biggest barrier to move beyond that. I look at this as the biggest risk.

of not overcoming that. So in many cases, tenured reps, they may be sitting on an eight to $12 million territory that they built, like full credit where credit is due. They've rocked life. But the risk of not having visibility as to how that rep has done that or how frequently reps visit this account, these people within that account is horribly critical to the business.

⁓ Long story short, you know where I'm driving with this, but not being able to pass the baton to keep that momentum going should never be an option or acceptable. I literally have meetings with distributors sometimes that say, look, we know the revenue bounce is going to happen. And it's just this inevitable like waving of the white flag of we know it's going to go from an 8 million to a 5 million, but then we'll get it back up with the new rep. I find that horribly unacceptable.

⁓ So I'll give you a real life example as to ⁓ a success story there. ⁓ I hate to go back to Jasper and Joe, but the man's kind of a mad scientist with processes and he's cracked a code here. So what he's done, they have 180 reps ⁓ in this day and age. They have many tenured reps that are about to sail off into the retirement sunset.

And so what they did, they proactively sat down with all these really successful tenured reps. And said, look, you need to give us a heads up when you're before you're ready for retirement. And so here's their game plan. They take these top territories and these top reps, they ask them to delay retirement for a year, but they only work two days a week now.

So they work a Monday and a Tuesday or whatever days of the week that they want to do, but they only retain the top 20 % of their accounts. bring in the next rep. who focuses solely on the first six months of that year long, focuses solely on the 80%, the bottom 80 % of those accounts. And what has ended up happening, the retiring rep grew the top 20 % accounts even higher.

And the new rep took those lower 80 % performing accounts and grew those. So in some cases, they actually ended up having to bring in two reps to replace the one. And then, In others, they just took that new rep for the last six months and slowly integrated into the top 20 % as well. But it's a wonderful case study of like, you do this effectively, what you think is a top territory has only scratched the surface to grow revenues even further.

speaker-0: So for you and the team there at MapMyCustomers and the tools that your team offers, how does that fit into this evolution of, I don't want to say tribal-based knowledge, but ⁓ ownership of territories, tenured ownership, ⁓ how does MapMyCustomers fit into that evolution on where that's going? And maybe further on that, what role should technology play versus a rep's own judgment in the way that they've done things for years? speaker-1: Yeah. So I do.

like this question a bunch as well. One of the reasons why we do so well and how is because of how easy we are to use. ⁓ Mike, we serve such a broad demographic of companies from blue collar automotive, like a Jasper, to really sophisticated distributors in the med device, med diagnostic space. We serve really well a really large precision medicine.

⁓ company where they're outside sales reps are called molecular oncology specialists. So the sophistication levels of our user base are wide. But the uniqueness of it is that those different polar opposites want the exact same thing. Give me something that is valuable that helps me do my job and give me something that is incredibly easy to use where I can execute.

I don't want admin work. So how we fit into the technology evolution of this is if you give a tenured rep that's been in their territory for 35 years, something that still helps them do their job and it doesn't get in their way, they use it. And so the benefit there is that the company actually has wonderful data to keep that baton passing moving forward. like data matters.

To answer the question around their own gut and intuition, Like, I don't think you need to go toe to toe with your top performers that they've been in the seat for 30 years. They're obviously doing something right. What you do need is that data. We have other customers, ironically enough in the automotive space, the tire space specifically, a distributor where all they do on a Friday morning, they sit down with, with Jimmy over coffee for an hour and everything over the last 30 to 40 years up here is his head sheets.

He's sitting down with coffee and he's just telling all about each account and they've got whether it's an intern or the rep that's going to ultimately inherit that baton. He's taken everything down so that he continued to use that data effectively as they have followed. speaker-0: Just that weekly brain dump there. That's pretty effective.

You gave a snapshot of, my customers earlier and kind of the core details, but let's get a little more detail there in terms of what our listeners should know about the company, its CRM capabilities, or just what your team has been up to lately. speaker-1: Yeah. So think of map my customers as the sales execution arm in the field. Mobile first, easy to use, incredibly valuable.

So half of our customer base uses Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, ERP systems. They made those big CRM choices oftentimes long before map my customers came into the picture. They ultimately brought us in because there was some sort of a gap in usage adoption. ⁓ They probably got a bunch of pushback from their field reps of saying, that's not how I work and it's not helpful.

So you bring that my customers in and we get to bring that data to life within that investment of the CRM that you did invest in. speaker-0: That perfect to end this on. And that's really all I had for you here, JT, before we sign off any final words of wisdom or just any parting thoughts on this topic before we sign off. ⁓ speaker-1: I would probably close with ⁓ just a big compliment to MDM Shift and NAW.

Again, you guys do it right. The networking, the way that you guys approach conferences, ⁓ we're grateful as a supplier and as a vendor. ⁓ And ultimately, I know that your actual membership is very grateful as well. It is evident by the same folks showing up and the ⁓ list of participants at each event.

Those roundtables are just spectacular learning. And you guys are doing it right. So kudos to you and the team. speaker-0: It's a definitely unique thing that we're able to offer.

yeah, we appreciate the feedback. Well, I think we covered a lot of great ground here that is going to really resonate with a lot of executives here that so many of these executive listeners we have grew up in sales, so they absolutely can identify with everything that you've been speaking to. So I think this has been a real valuable conversation. And with that, JT, thanks again for joining the podcast.

speaker-1: Thanks for having me, Mike. Appreciate it. speaker-0: Thanks for listening to the MDM Amplify podcast, which is all about elevating the voice of service providers that are helping distributors every day. Like what you just heard, you can find all of our episodes at MDM.

com slash podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.