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We’ve spent the last few weeks making a case. That an in-house field team costs more than the salary line suggests. That fixed capacity struggles against a seasonal calendar. That outsourcing doesn’t cost you control, and that an outsourced team can care about your brand as much as your own people do.

All of which is exactly what you’d expect a field marketing group to say.

Avidity runs field teams, tactical activation, EPOS analytics and consumer experiences for FMCG brands across the UK and Ireland, through McCurrach, Standout, Zing, Thumbprint and Wave. We have an interest in the answer and it would be odd to pretend otherwise.

So here’s somebody who doesn’t. Claire Baigrie joined us as Partnership and Marketing Director sixteen months ago, after 25 years brand side in drinks: a rep on the Smirnoff Ice launch, then leading a 50-person national field team at Bacardi Martini, then running the client side of an outsourced field partnership at AG Barr. Twice she was told to bring an agency team back in-house, and she did it.

For most of that time she believed the opposite of what we’ve been publishing. She was told early in her career that nobody outsourced would ever care about your brands the way your own people do, and she says she bought it wholeheartedly.

We put the questions brands actually ask us to her. She agrees with most of it. Where she doesn’t, or where she thinks agencies behave badly, we’ve left it in.

Do you lose control when you outsource a field sales team?

No, and Claire’s view is that you often gain some. Control comes from accountability, agreed KPIs and someone whose job it is to answer for the numbers. What you lose is the day to day operational load, which is not the same thing.

“We all like to be in control, and I say that as somebody who doesn’t like losing control. But the right outsourced field team shouldn’t feel like you’re losing control. It should feel like they’re an extension of your team, that they’re part of your team already. They’re not a separate supplier sitting off to the side.”

She’s blunt about where that belief comes from. In-house feels like control because the people report to you. But reporting lines are not the same as visibility.

“In-house it’s very easy to just put them to one side. With an agency there is someone you’re asking a question of, and there are KPIs and measurements in place they’re expected to deliver to a standard.”

Can an outsourced team really care about your brand as much as your own people?

Yes, and Claire believed the opposite for most of her career. She was told early on that a brand should always sell its own brands, because nobody outsourced would be as passionate. She says she bought it wholeheartedly, and that it took moving agency side to see it wasn’t true.

“I see it in our client teams. Even down to things like choosing a drink or a snack at lunch, they’ll be very clear they’ll only drink their client’s brands, because for them that’s part of their brand. I know people who’ve moved on from clients and still feel that loyalty.”

Her point isn’t that every outsourced team is passionate. It’s that passion doesn’t arrive with an employment contract. It comes from picking the right partner and treating the team like part of the business.

How fast can an outsourced field team react when something goes wrong?

Faster than an in-house team, in Claire’s experience, because reacting is what the agency is set up to do. She uses product recalls as the example, and she has run two.

“The call would come in at 11 o’clock, maybe 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d have to do an immediate recall. The quickest way, apart from informing all the right authorities, was to mobilise our field team and get product off shelf. Instead of me having to work out how to mobilise an in-house team, I could go to the agency and say, we’ve got this problem, it needs doing in the next three hours.”

That’s the part she says brands underestimate.

“At that point I stepped back and dealt with everything internally, and the account manager just made it happen. That was the first time I realised the power of having that external team.”

What do brands miss when they cost a field team themselves?

The costs that don’t sit in the field sales budget. Recruitment, vacancy downtime, IT kit and licences, fleet, training, HR time and management hours all land in other departments, so they rarely get challenged. Claire says her finance director always got a cost per store visit from her, and it was never the true one.

We covered the full picture in the true cost of a field team, and Claire has written up her own version of it in what my business case never showed.

One thing she adds that’s easy to miss is buying power.

“There’s the scale of operation an agency has. They can unlock better pricing on IT equipment, packages, cars. A brand with a team of eight to ten people, even twenty, isn’t buying at the same scale as an agency with hundreds of cars and hundreds of laptops.”

What do field marketing agencies get wrong about brands?

Three things, and Claire felt all of them as a client. This is the section where she’s hardest on us.

The first is arriving as the expert.

“Sometimes they did know better than me. But don’t come in and tell me my team is doing something wrong, because that gets the fences up straight away. Challenge the way I’m thinking instead.”

The second is one size fits all.

“Don’t just come in and tell me this is what you need. Sometimes I can’t articulate what I need in a sentence. You need somebody to pull the answers out of you with different questions.”

The third still frustrates her, and it’s the one we’ve taken most to heart.

“Tell me what’s new. Tell me what innovation is out there. I might not have the money to spend on it right now, but my competitors might have an advantage because they’re using a tool I didn’t even know existed.”

What can a field team do beyond visiting stores?

Fix the problem before anyone walks through the door. Claire’s phrase for what she used to think field sales was is “feet in the street”, and she says the biggest surprise of moving agency side was how much sits behind that.

The clearest example is stock that never reaches the shelf.

“You’ve invested in the launch, the TV advert, the gondola end, the promotion. Then it falls down on allocations. The stock is sitting at depot. My account managers would never have had time to work out which depot. A platform like DART highlights it straight away, you take it to your buyer, and they challenge their own supply team.”

The other is channels where the data is thin.

“Convenience is complex. I had to build a convenience strategy in my first three months here and didn’t know where to start. Pinpoint takes EPOS data and gives you pack, size, price, competitor information. That would have been gold to me brand side, and I wouldn’t even have had to buy the platform. I could have asked for curated insight.”

When should a brand keep its field team in-house?

When the team is core to how the business sells, works across a small number of strategic customers or channels, and the business will keep investing in it properly. Claire is clear that in-house is genuinely right for some brands, and she has run good ones.

“I’ve worked in some brilliant in-house teams. The pride, the passion, the ownership, there’s something really powerful about people who live and breathe your brand. That works for some brands.”

The condition she’d attach is investment.

“It only works well when the business is prepared to invest. You don’t bring people in and expect them to do the role for the next two or three years without continuing to invest in them.”

We’ve set out how to make that call in in-house, outsourced or hybrid.

Where does a hybrid field model actually work?

New channels, seasonal peaks and anything you want to test before committing budget. Claire’s answer is the most practical thing she says, and it’s what she’d have done differently in her own roles.

“You can have your core team, but you might want to explore a new channel and how field sales would work in it. Areas that are really complex, a small scale field team can go in and see whether there’s opportunity to unlock, and how you’d unlock it.”

She’s specific about the advantage of testing small.

“You don’t want to put lots of investment behind it initially because you don’t know if it’s going to work. Why not pilot it? Four people in a region, these are the KPIs we’re going to measure. If it works, that lets you build the case for investment the following year.”

And on the thing brands worry about most:

“It doesn’t become us and them. It could. But if you get the right partner, it doesn’t have to be.”

The one thing she’d tell her former self

“Don’t be afraid to have the conversation. It’s not a reflection of something you and your teams aren’t doing right. It doesn’t cost anything to have the conversation, and if it’s not right for now, it might be right in the future.”

If you’re weighing this up before 2027 planning, book a Field Model Review with Claire.

She’ll work through your model with you and she’ll tell you when in-house is the right answer: https://meetings.hubspot.com/claire-baigrie/consultation-for-inhouse-vs-outsourced-teams