Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

I have found with the right training sales people should become a natural source of first hand consumer insights. They need to look at two elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- interpreting formal consumer performance data

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is ofcourse the biggest and easiest are to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weakly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Interpreting formal consumer performance data
I found that this element is underutilized. Firstly there is not a natural tendency to consider these infos. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
What also helps is translating the insights into channel meaning. So linking consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers. Also there needs to be a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.