Sales Challenges: Facing Sales Hurdles? Let’s Tackle Them Together

In today’s fast-paced CPG world, sales teams constantly hit operational roadblocks. From inconsistent field work to clunky distribution processes, these challenges slow your growth and cut team effectiveness.

For growing beverage, wellness, and lifestyle brands – especially those juggling retail execution and wholesale channels – sales inefficiencies happen all the time. Good news? Most of these obstacles aren’t just identifiable but totally fixable with the right systems in place.

This article spotlights the most common sales challenges across field sales, retail execution, and distribution – and shows how SimplyDepo helps CPG companies overcome them fast and at scale.

Common Sales Challenges in Today’s CPG Landscape

While your organization faces unique situations, certain patterns show up across fast-scaling CPG brands. These are five of the biggest sales roadblocks you’ll encounter.

1. Limited Visibility into Field Team Activities

According to a Salesforce report, 60% of sales teams face challenges due to fragmented data and a lack of visibility into real-time activities. At the same time, a study by McKinsey found that businesses with real-time reporting capabilities saw up to a 25% improvement in operational efficiency by enabling faster decision-making and response times.
Research by Aberdeen Group showed that companies with centralized field reporting had a 16% higher customer retention rate and 12% greater sales growth compared to those with siloed data.

Lack of consistent reporting from field reps creates fragmented insights and slow responses. When sales and merchandising teams work without centralized oversight, your leadership struggles to access accurate, real-time data on store visits, campaign execution, and team performance.

This disconnect limits your ability to make smart decisions or quickly fix issues happening in the field.

2. Disorganized Retail Execution

According to a study by Deloitte, 35% of trade marketing efforts fail due to poor execution at the point of sale, such as missed planograms, incomplete promotional setups, or inconsistent branding across stores.

For brands investing heavily in trade marketing or point-of-sale activation, messy execution dilutes impact, cuts ROI, and damages relationships with retail partners. Without structured tracking systems, visibility remains limited.

3. Route Planning Inefficiencies

Research by Fleet Complete revealed that businesses with outdated route planning systems experience an average 15% increase in fuel costs due to longer and less efficient routes.

In many field operations, time and resources get wasted through poor routing. Reps spend too much time driving between locations or covering inefficient territories, resulting in fewer store visits and reduced selling time.

Manual or outdated route planning drives up fuel costs, lowers productivity, and puts unnecessary strain on your field teams.

4. Inventory Miscommunication

A Retail Systems Research study found that over 40% of retailers experience stockouts at least once a week, leading to lost sales and customer dissatisfaction.

Breakdowns between field teams, operations, and distributors cause stockouts, overstocking, and wrong orders. This misalignment creates tension with retailers, causes missed sales opportunities, and hurts your brand reputation on the shelf.

Without real-time inventory visibility, fixing problems happens too late or with incomplete information.

5. Manual Wholesale Ordering Processes

Research from Gartner highlighted that supply chains with manual order management systems are 3 times more likely to experience stockouts and late shipments, which directly impacts customer loyalty and long-term growth.

As your brand grows, relying on spreadsheets, emails, and texts for wholesale orders quickly becomes impossible. Manual processes lead to order errors, late shipments, and zero visibility across the supply chain.

This operational mess blocks scalability and overloads internal teams who must manually fix data across multiple systems.

A Centralized Solution: How SimplyDepo Addresses Sales Challenges

SimplyDepo is a specialized sales platform built for CPG brands, distributors, and field sales organizations. It offers a unified environment for managing retail execution, wholesale ordering, and team performance.

Key Platform Features

• Mobile App for Field Teams
  Empower your field reps and merchandisers to report store visits, capture photos, and complete tasks in real time.
• Real-Time Inventory and Order Management
  Ensure accurate data sync between field teams, warehouses, and account managers to eliminate miscommunication.
• Route Optimization
  Simplify territory planning, cut travel time, and boost the number of store visits per rep.
• Retail Execution Tracking
  Get instant visibility into campaign execution, planogram compliance, and store-level performance.
• Data Consolidation
  Centralize all sales and field data into one platform for smarter decision-making and operational control.

📌 Explore the Full potential of SimplyDepo →

Case Studies: How Leading Brands Resolved Sales Challenges

These examples show how SimplyDepo supports real-world operations and drives measurable improvements across multiple areas.

🧱 Brickyard Brands

Challenge: Inconsistent retail data and unscalable workflows
Solution: Transition to mobile-first workflows and structured reporting through SimplyDepo
Outcome: Improved retail visibility, faster internal coordination, and measurable sales growth

🧘‍♀️ iCalm

Challenge: Difficulty tracking promotions and gathering field feedback
Solution: Implementation of customized app workflows for retail visits and campaign tracking
Outcome: Increased promotional compliance and greater alignment between brand and field teams

☕ Sail Away Coffee

Challenge: Inability to manage growing wholesale orders through manual processes
Solution: Adoption of mobile ordering and automated order flow within the SimplyDepo platform
Outcome: Improved order accuracy, reduced manual workload, and stronger wholesale relationships

A Smarter Approach to Field Sales and Distribution

Expect operational complexity as your brand scales—but don’t let it stop your growth.

Sales teams that implement the right infrastructure gain a competitive advantage through better visibility, faster execution, and fewer errors. With SimplyDepo, CPG brands transform retail execution and wholesale operations into a streamlined, data-driven process.

🎯 Discover how SimplyDepo is supporting the next generation of beverage, wellness, and lifestyle brands.