Every few years, most brand commercial teams end up in the same meeting: is our field model still right for us? It usually starts with a budget challenge, a coverage gap or a new commercial director. Here's how to have that conversation properly, before planning season makes it urgent.
Start with five questions
- Where are opportunities being missed because you lack the capability or capacity to chase them?
- What does each store visit really cost once people, cars, kit, tech, licensing, accreditation and admin are counted?
- Can coverage flex with your promotional calendar?
- Where does your store-level insight come from, and how fast can you act on it?
- How quickly could you respond to an availability issue this week?
Are you unclear on any of these? That’s where your conversation needs to start.
The three models
Fully in-house means owning the team, the culture and the capability outright. It's the right call when field is strategically core, your coverage needs are stable year-round, and you have the appetite and time to run recruitment, training, cover and reporting as a permanent operation.
Outsourced means a specialist partner runs dedicated or syndicated coverage for you, with people, management, technology and data all included. It works best when you need flexibility, speed, store-level insight and a single accountable cost. Dedicated teams carry your brand exclusively, while tactical models add burst capacity for launches, seasonal pushes and availability fixes.
Hybrid keeps a core you own and outsources the flex. It's increasingly the pragmatic answer: hold onto strategic account or channel expertise in-house, and bring in a partner for scale coverage, seasonal peaks, tactical response and the data engine. You keep control where it matters and buy flexibility where it pays.
What good looks like, whichever you choose
Whichever model you choose, a few things should hold true: coverage led by opportunity and guided by data, call files that change when the EPOS says so, and reporting your commercial team actually uses in retailer conversations. None of that means geography stops mattering - for plenty of brands it still earns its place, a heartland market being the obvious example, and a good model works with that rather than overriding it. You should know your cost per visit and have a way to flex it. If your current model delivers all of that, keep it. If it doesn't, that's not a failure, it just means the model has aged as your business has changed.
How to run the evaluation
Give it a fortnight rather than a quarter. Pull together twelve months of field costs, all of them, and map your demand calendar against your actual coverage. Then pressure-test the options with someone who runs field teams every day. We do this as a Field Model Review, a working session on your numbers, your calendar and your options across all three models, and if in-house turns out to be right for you, that's exactly what we'll say.
Book a Field Model Review at Meet with Claire Baigrie - and go into 2027 planning with the numbers already done.
