Claire Baigrie spent 25 years brand side in drinks, budgeting for in-house field teams and then running them. She now sits agency side as Partnership and Marketing Director at Avidity. This is what she wishes she had asked.
Resignations usually land on a Monday morning. People take the weekend to decide, then they tell you first thing.
The worst ones arrived the same way every time. A good rep, an important territory, and a big customer activation about to go live. I can still remember one of them. I felt sick all weekend.
Not disappointment in them, they were doing exactly the right thing for their career. Panic. Because I already knew what the weeks after it looked like, and almost none of it was the job I was actually supposed to be doing.
I spent 25 years brand side in drinks. I started as a rep myself, on the team that launched Smirnoff Ice across the East of Scotland, for an agency, before Diageo absorbed us. I went on to lead the Inspire team at Bacardi Martini, 50 people and six regional managers covering the Bacardi Brown-Forman portfolio across the whole of the UK. At AG Barr I sat on the other side again and managed our outsourced field partnership with McCurrach.
And twice in my career, I had to bring an outsourced team in-house. Neither decision was mine. Both came down from above on cost and control, and on the numbers in front of us they were the right call. The numbers were missing things.
What does an in-house field team really cost?
More than the business case says. Salary, car and expenses are the visible lines. The invisible ones are recruitment, vacancy cover, IT kit and licences, fleet, training, HR and finance time, field technology, reporting and the management hours holding it together. Most of those sit in other departments’ budgets, so nobody adds them up.
My finance director used to ask me directly. Come on Claire, what’s the true cost per store visit your team are delivering? He always got an answer. I’d buy myself a few days, go away and work it out, and come back with a number.
It was never the true cost.
I could give him salary. I could give him time and motion, how long a call took, calls per day, mileage. What I couldn’t give him was the laptop and the applications on it, the recruitment, the training our HR team built for us, the fleet admin sitting in finance, the IT refresh cycle, my regional managers’ time, my own time. Those costs don’t disappear when you run a team in-house. They scatter. They land in someone else’s budget, and once they land in someone else’s budget nobody challenges them.
That’s the leaky bucket. An agency invoice is easy to see, so it gets scrutinised line by line. An internal cost sitting in IT, in HR and in finance doesn’t.
There’s one more thing I never priced properly, and it’s the one I’d flag hardest now. Scale. When we leased cars, we might lease twenty. An agency leases hundreds. Same with laptops, same with software licences, same with the recruitment pipeline and the talent pool behind it. I was paying single-team prices for everything, then comparing that to a business buying at a completely different scale. That gap never appeared in a single business case I wrote.
At one drinks business I worked for, we saved close to seven figures by bringing a team in-house. On paper, and on the basis we used, that was correct. We were comparing a contracted fee against salaries. Played through over three years, with the sickness cover, the maternity leave, the vacancies, the kit refresh and everything else the agency had simply absorbed for us, I don’t believe that saving was ever really there.
What happens when a vacancy lands in the middle of a peak trading window?
A vacancy, a peak activation window and a channel priority that won’t move. On paper you still have a full field plan. In reality you have an uncovered territory, a regional manager plugging the gap, another part of the team pulled onto something else, and everyone working out what to drop rather than what to do.
Those weeks were constant compromise. I wasn’t asking what’s the best plan. I was asking what can we physically cover. Those are very different conversations, and only one of them grows a brand.
Here’s the arithmetic that used to keep me awake. Say I’ve sold an activation into a grocer across 200 stores, and I have a vacant territory with 50 stores in it. That’s a quarter of what I promised, and there’s no switch to flip. Recruiting properly takes four to twelve weeks: refine the job description, write the advert, advertise, interview, deliberate, offer, work round a notice period, onboard, immerse them in the brand, buddy them up, and eventually let them loose on a territory. Interviews always take longer than you plan for. The activation window doesn’t wait for any of it. The retailer certainly doesn’t.
We were resourceful. At Christmas we moved on-trade people into off-trade. We ran what we called hot housing, pulling people from across the business to blitz an area. It was great for team spirit and it genuinely helped.
But nothing is free. Everyone in that store had a day job they weren’t doing. Everyone in that store was working outside their comfort zone, because people choose their roles for a reason: if you wanted to be in field sales, you’d be in field sales. And a one-week hot house could carry three months of planning behind it, building call files for territories none of us knew and teaching the steps of the call to people who had never sold in store.
The cost of that turns up in February, when someone in finance hasn’t closed something off because they spent December building displays. At the time I was just delighted to have extra feet in the street. I never once counted what it cost the rest of the business.
What did I get wrong about field marketing agencies?
Mostly the size of them. I thought an outsourced field team was people in stores, and that the value was presence. What I’d never seen was the data underneath, the EPOS analytics and the platforms that tell a team where to go and what to fix. I was buying feet in the street and there was a great deal more on the table.
I’ve written separately about the belief I inherited early on, that nobody outsourced will ever care about your brands the way your own people do. I held that for twenty years without testing it, and I was wrong. That’s a longer story than this piece has room for.
The part that belongs here is the part that would have changed my business case.
Take convenience. It’s a difficult channel to build a strategy for, because unlike grocery there’s very little data in it. I spent a long time on one, brand side, largely guessing. Agency side I found a platform reading EPOS that gives you pack, size, price and competitor detail right across the channel. I’d have paid for that. As it happens I wouldn’t have had to, because curated insight would have done the job.
Grocery is the opposite problem. You drown in data. Every grocer sends you plenty of it, all of it in Excel, and my account managers had ten other things to do before they got near it.
Take allocations. You’ve paid for the launch, the advert, the gondola end and the promotion, and it falls over because the stock is sitting at depot and never reaches the shelf. No amount of feet in the street fixes that. The rep walks in and it’s out the back, or it isn’t there at all. A platform that surfaces which depot is holding what means you take it to your buyer, they challenge their own supply team, and it’s solved before anybody walks through a door.
Auditing a problem and solving one are not the same job. I spent years paying for the first and assuming it was the second.
What do agencies still get wrong about brands?
Three things, and I felt all of them as a client. They tell you they know your brand better than you do. They arrive with a solution before they’ve asked what you need. And they assume you have no money, so they never tell you what exists.
That last one is the one that still bugs me, and I’m on the agency side of the desk now.
On knowing better: sometimes they genuinely did. An agency sees across categories and I only ever saw mine, so they’d walk into a quarterly review with something I hadn’t considered. Fine. But there’s a way to do it. Challenge how I’m thinking and I’ll listen and probably learn something. Tell me my team is doing it wrong and the fences go up before you’ve finished the sentence.
On one size fits all: don’t come in and tell me what I need. Ask me, then keep asking, because I couldn’t always put it in a sentence. Getting that out of a client with better questions is the job, not a preamble to the job.
And on budget: tell me what’s new anyway. What’s changed in field, in data, in AI. Assume I’m interested rather than assuming I’m skint. A no this year is not a no, and the alternative is that I read about it in a case study written for one of my competitors.
When is an in-house field team genuinely the right call?
When field is core to how the business sells, when the team covers a small number of strategic customers or channels, and when there’s leadership capacity and continuing investment behind it. In-house isn’t the cheap route or the easy one. It’s the right one when you want to own the whole engine and not just the outcome.
I want to be clear, because I’ve worked in some brilliant in-house teams. The pride, the ownership, people who live and breathe the brand every day. That’s real, it’s powerful, and no agency should pretend otherwise.
But be honest about the conditions. In-house works when the business keeps investing: not just salary and cars, but training, coaching, systems, reporting, HR support and the senior time it takes to keep a team focused and performing. You don’t hire people and expect them to run themselves for three years.
Watch how these teams grow, too. I’ve seen it happen. You start with two people. One becomes the manager and recruits a few more. Then a controller. Then before anyone has gone back to the original business case, you have a sales director and a field team nobody ever consciously decided to build, carrying every hidden cost that comes with it.
The questions I’d ask before choosing a field model now
If I could sit my former self down before a field model decision, I wouldn’t start with in-house or outsourced at all. I’d start here.
Where are the gaps in my strategy? Not what am I doing. What am I not doing. Which channels am I absent from. Where’s the leaky bucket, where I’m pouring NPD in at the top and losing it out the bottom.
How effective and efficient are we really? Including me. We get so used to how we do things that we forget to look up.
Does it have to be all or nothing? It doesn’t. Protect the core team that’s genuinely strategic. Supplement it at the moments that matter. Pilot a new channel with four people and clear KPIs before committing a year’s investment. If it works you’ve built next year’s case. If it doesn’t, you found out cheaply.
And the honest one: what am I not asking because of something I decided years ago?
That last one is mine. I wrote outsourcing off more than once as too expensive or not flexible enough, and I never fully explored either claim. Those views were inherited and out of date. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have been more curious. I’d have asked the questions even when there was no budget, because the budget was never the point. The answers might not have been right for that year. They might have been exactly right for the next one.
One thing, if you’re proud of your in-house team
You should be. Your team are doing a great job juggling a lot of different priorities and they’re the experts in the part of the business you brought them in to run.
This isn’t about replacing them. It’s about whether there’s a different way of doing things that frees their time to drive growth somewhere else. The convenience opportunity is huge, and almost nobody has the capacity to open it up properly.
And don’t let the passion in your own team convince you nobody else can feel it. Not many people move from brand to agency. I did. Our teams are just as loyal to your brands as anyone.
Back to that Monday morning
That Monday morning resignation still sits with me. Not because we failed to cover it, we did, we always did. Because of what covering it actually cost, and how little of that cost anyone ever saw.
If you’re weighing this up going into 2027 planning, I’m happy to compare notes. I sat in your seat for a long time and I’ll tell you honestly what I think, including the times when in-house is the right answer.
Book a Field Model Review with me and we’ll work through your model together, honestly, whatever the answer turns out to be.: https://meetings.hubspot.com/claire-baigrie/consultation-for-inhouse-vs-outsourced-teams
