Ask most commercial teams what their field operation costs and they'll quote the payroll. But for many brands the salary line only tells part of the story. The wider costs of maintaining field coverage sit across different budgets, which makes comparing in-house, outsourced and hybrid models harder than it first appears.
The visible number
Salaries times headcount. Simple, budgetable, easy to defend in a planning meeting. If that were the whole cost, this would be a very short article.
The six lines beneath it
- Recruitment and attrition. Field roles turn over faster than head-office ones. Every leaver means agency fees or ad spend, interview time, and weeks of patchy coverage while the territory sits empty.
- Training and onboarding. New starters need product knowledge, systems training, retail craft and time in-store with someone experienced. Someone who, by the way, isn't covering their own calls while they do it.
- Holiday and sickness cover. A 20-person team is never actually a 20-person team. Annual leave, sickness and vacancies mean real coverage runs 15-20% below the org chart, all year round.
- Fleet, mileage and kit. Cars or allowances, fuel, insurance, phones, tablets, uniforms, POS storage. Small lines individually. Together, a budget line most plans forget.
- Reporting and field technology. Call file management, journey planning, data capture, dashboards. Whether you build or buy, someone has to run it and keep it running.
- Management time. The line that never makes the spreadsheet. Recruiting, coaching, performance-managing and covering a field team eats senior commercial time that was hired to grow the business, not to administer it.
The capacity problem
Even with every line costed, a fixed team has a structural issue: your demand isn't flat. Easter, summer activation, Christmas, NPD launches and range reviews create peaks a fixed team can't reach, and troughs where you're paying for capacity you don't need. Money leaks either way.
There's a coordination cost on top of that. Running a field team means constantly leaning on other in-house functions - finance for fuel cards and floats, IT for software licences and kit set up and delivered in time for new starters, HR for recruitment, onboarding and training of field teams. For those teams it's rarely the priority, so the chasing lands on commercial managers and pulls them away from the growth work they were hired to do.
What outsourcing changes
An outsourced field team turns all of the above into one point of contact and one number, tied to the activity you need. Recruitment, training, cover, kit and reporting become the partner's job. Scale becomes theirs to solve. You also gain breadth of expertise in one place - territory planning, execution, data analysis and recruitment - rather than stretching people from across your business every time you need it. And a specialist arrives with something an internal build takes years to create: a running data engine. Our teams capture 300 million data points a day across more than 2 million store visits a year, with EPOS insight across the Grocery estate including over 12,000 convenience stores. From week one, activity points at the stores with the biggest opportunity. And far from losing control, you gain visibility: clear KPIs, shared dashboards and governance, with no hidden costs sitting behind the single line.
In-house vs outsourced field teams: weighing cost, flexibility and effort
In-house isn't wrong. If field is a capability you want to own, your coverage needs are stable and you have the management bandwidth, owning it can be the right call.
For plenty of brands the answer is hybrid: a core team you own, with flexible coverage that scales around it. You don't give up control - you hand over the admin, not the oversight. The point was never the model. It's knowing what each store visit returns under each option.
Stripped back, the case for outsourced is simple: one cost line instead of six hidden ones, coverage that scales with your calendar instead of sitting fixed, and a data engine that's already running instead of one you'd have to build from scratch. Seen as return on field investment rather than cost alone, the case sharpens further: more flexibility, more productive coverage and a clearer line between what you spend and what you get back. None of that makes in-house wrong, it just means outsourced is worth pricing against, not assuming against.
The pull towards outsourcing usually comes down to predictability more than headcount: what you're spending and what you're getting back are both easier to see when someone else is running the machinery day to day. That's not an argument against in-house, just a reason to check the sums before assuming either model is the obvious answer.
Do the maths on your own numbers
A Field Model Review is a working session with our field specialists: your cost base, your coverage, your data and your calendar, compared honestly across in-house, outsourced and hybrid. Book yours at Meet with Claire Baigrie
