Which KPIs Should You Use to Track and Manage Your Sales Force in Large-Scale Retail?

17/08/2026
09:42

reading time : 2 min

Lucie Monnot

Content Marketing Manager

Which performance indicators are all sales directors tracking today? If you think the number of daily visits made by territory managers is the best KPI, it may be time to rethink your approach and introduce indicators that genuinely reflect the performance of your sales representatives and brands.

Not every indicator is a KPI

As a National Sales Director, you spend a great deal of time reviewing figures to monitor team activity, sales trends and the achievement of individual and collective objectives.

For convenience, you may refer to all these figures as “KPIs,” but they are not necessarily KPIs. Many are simply counts or quantities that provide some information about team activity, but do not necessarily reflect the performance of your territory managers.

As such, they do not deserve to be called key performance indicators and cannot provide an objective basis for calculating all or part of variable compensation.

A genuine KPI is never a raw figure. It is always a processed figure, such as a rate, average, percentage or score, that summarizes several pieces of information and makes it possible to track change over time.
This definition requires you to ensure that the data on which each KPI is based is available.
Whether simple or complex, a KPI only has meaning when compared with an external benchmark or a clearly defined internal objective.

Why the number of visits is not a good KPI

Until fairly recently, almost all territory managers were given objectives based on the number of visits they made each day. This is no longer the case, as confirmed by participants in the round table on KPIs held as part of the Sales Force Breakfast organized by Nomadia in October 2024.

Previously considered a KPI and therefore closely monitored by National Sales Directors, the number of visits per day is no longer considered representative of territory manager performance.

The only KPI we have genuinely abandoned is the number of daily visits. It used to be a kind of Holy Grail. We still look at it, but it is no longer used as an objective. In practice, the highest-performing sales representatives are not necessarily those who make the most visits. Nor are they necessarily the ones who achieve the best sell-out results.

Julien DEMULIER, Deputy Managing Director, The Beers Family

The Beers Family is a shared sales force organization created by breweries. It currently has 29 employees, including 23 sales representatives representing six beer brands in large-scale retail.

At Actiale, which establishes and manages permanent sales forces for many brands, the number of daily visits has also fallen down the hierarchy of performance indicators, along with all metrics relating to the daily monitoring of sales activity.

We monitor these indicators and share them with our customers, while knowing that they do not explicitly expect a predetermined number of visits. The quality of visits matters much more than their quantity. Three long visits accompanied by meaningful actions are better than five visits that lead to nothing.

Sébastien YVON, Head of Sales Force and Business Development, Actiale

Giving too much importance to the number of daily visits risks encouraging sales representatives to “make visits for the sake of making visits.”

That is why National Sales Directors now prefer to track the percentage of active visits, meaning visits that generate at least one action, such as:

Product listing.
Merchandising.
Point-of-sale setup.
Another measurable commercial action.

Following the same logic, some sales directors track the number of seated meetings because they assume these meetings are more valuable and have a greater impact than standing meetings in the aisle.

However, this remains open to debate.

Store visits have changed considerably, as has the time available to department managers. If sales representatives are trained to conduct effective meetings, they can achieve exactly the same results during standing aisle meetings as during seated meetings.

Laurence LE JEUNNE, Commercial Director, Consumer Beauty, Coty

Others consider it more relevant to calculate a productive contact rate.

This is increasingly relevant as videoconferencing and telephone calls become a more common part of territory managers’ schedules.

Today, 25% of organizations have a calling or videoconferencing policy. These policies mainly concern drive-through and click-and-collect channels, but 10% of organizations have started testing them in hypermarkets and supermarkets.

Source: Field Sales Force Survey, Nomadia 2024.

The number of daily visits should not disappear from dashboards. It remains a very useful warning indicator because it can reveal overactivity or underactivity.

The manager must then investigate the causes with the relevant territory manager.

A sales representative who makes many field visits but whose results remain stagnant clearly needs support.

This is a good opportunity to remember that indicators are complementary and that no single KPI is sufficient on its own.

Sales directors’ favorite KPIs

When asked which KPIs they monitor most closely, National Sales Directors mention the following.

Numeric assortment holding

Numeric assortment holding measures the ratio between the number of product references actually present on the shelf and the number expected according to the assortment agreed with the retailer or point of sale.

A low numeric assortment holding rate means that certain products are missing from shelves even though they should be available. As a result, those products cannot be purchased, which has a direct impact on revenue.

If we assume that territory managers’ primary responsibility is to ensure that the products they represent are present and visible on shelves, numeric assortment holding is a highly relevant indicator for evaluating their field performance.

Numeric distribution

Numeric distribution, or ND, measures the number of stores actively selling a company’s or brand’s products compared with the total number of stores in the same category.

This indicator is more macro-level than the previous one. It reflects the overall effectiveness of the company’s strategy and listing policy more than the field performance of individual territory managers.

As a result, it is a highly strategic indicator for National Sales Directors. It helps them identify the retailers and stores where the company’s presence is weak and define priorities for territory managers.

ND is my main KPI because if the product is not present, nothing else matters. Nothing happens. It is therefore the first criterion to monitor.

Sébastien YVON, Head of Sales Force and Business Development, Actiale

I closely monitor changes in sell-out volumes, meaning the number of items sold at checkout. However, ND is my number one lever and determines 80% of the business.

Julien DEMULIER, Deputy Managing Director, The Beers Family

Weighted distribution

Weighted distribution, or WD, assigns a relative value to stores according to their sales revenue in the product category marketed by the company.

This indicator helps sales forces prioritize high-potential stores in order to optimize visit policies and the action programs implemented by sales representatives to maximize that potential.

National Sales Directors naturally monitor more than these three KPIs.

These standard business KPIs are generally supplemented by custom KPIs and temporary KPIs, created to track issues and challenges specific to a particular context.

Examples include the acquisition of a brand or a major organizational change, such as moving from a single-category sales force to a multi-category sales force.

Because sales force software provides increasingly large volumes of activity data, and because data supplied by panels and retailers is becoming richer, it can be tempting to multiply the number of indicators.

Companies may assume that it is always better to have too many indicators than not enough.

This can lead to overloaded dashboards filled with obsolete or unnecessary indicators. These dashboards make it difficult to focus on what matters and take the right operational, organizational and strategic decisions.

With Nomadia Field Sales, National Sales Directors, regional managers and territory managers have dashboards adapted to their roles and levels of responsibility.

They can prioritize and monitor the KPIs that are relevant to their objectives.

The pitfalls that can distort your KPIs

Two “laws” are worth remembering when using KPIs effectively.

Campbell’s law

The first is Campbell’s law, named after sociologist Donald T. Campbell:

The more a quantitative social indicator is used for decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the processes it is intended to monitor.

This law highlights the risk of relying on a management system limited to quantitative indicators, particularly simple measurements and counts.

To understand the implications of Campbell’s law, it is useful to refer to Goodhart’s law, named after economist Charles Goodhart:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Why? Because it corrupts the decisions you make and the actions you take.

Instead of measuring performance to understand the current situation and improve the process, your priority becomes improving the measurement result itself, rather than achieving the results expected from the process.

This is precisely the risk associated with an indicator such as the number of daily visits. As noted above, it can encourage sales representatives to “make visits for the sake of making visits” because they are given objectives based on this criterion rather than on the added value generated by their visits.

Keep this in mind when choosing the indicators, and particularly the KPIs, that you decide to implement.

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