Building a good technology company boils down to solving a real-world problem thoughtfully and effectively. It’s also easier to identify and solve those problems when you have first-hand experience with them. That’s how Austin Rolling, CEO of customer relations management (CRM) and field sales mobile app Outfield, came up with the idea for his Houston-based company in 2015.

Rolling was working in outside sales and field sales for companies like Apple Beats by Dre and Whirlpool, working with both individual consumers and retail establishments on a wholesale level.

“One of the things that occurred to me while I was actually in those roles was the tools that they gave us while we were out in the field were very underwhelming,” Rolling tells Cannabis Business Executive. Even when the first mobile tools became available, they felt to him like “a bunch of engineers got together in a room and said, ‘Hey, let’s build these features’ without actually talking to the end user to understand the application of it.”

These experiences formed Rolling’s vision for Outfield when he was approached by Nutrabolt (the parent company to C4 pre-workout drinks and other nutraceutical brands) to solve their field sales efficiency problem following his graduation from Texas A&M’s MBA program. “They didn’t have a tool in place that would actually help them understand what was going on out in the field,” Rolling explains. “So they needed a platform for that.”

Along with Adam Steele, Outfield’s Chief Technology Officer, Rolling built an in-house version of his CRM platform which the duo ultimately purchased from Nutrabolt in 2015 to expand into the nutraceutical market. “Over time we just realized that field sales workflow isn’t really unique to nutraceuticals,” Rolling says, “so we eventually became industry agnostic.”

Now with customers in more than 50 countries spanning more than a dozen industries, Rolling and Outfield are excited to tackle the company’s next great growth opportunity: the cannabis industry.

Gamified Sales Management

As a black man in Texas, Rolling was understandably wary of entering the cannabis industry, especially considering his platform had already successfully integrated into many other industries. Outfield has clients in the alcohol, consumer electronics, CPG, insurance, and energy sectors, to name a few. But it was that proven track record operating in other industries that made Outfield’s tools attractive to the cannabis businesses who started reaching out to Rolling in 2017.

Indeed, Rolling believes he has solved one of the main barriers to building a successful field sales and CRM software company: getting salespeople to actually use the platform. As a former field sales rep, he knew how poorly built software can feel like Big Brother is constantly watching your every move–but he also knew how most salespeople have competitive personalities. So Outfield took a “behavioral psychology” approach in analyzing the problem and decided to “gamify” the experience. “Once we incrementally started adding these game mechanics, we started noticing an uptick in adoption,” Rolling remembers.

Starting in 2017 with a simple leaderboard ranking sales team members, Outfield has taken an almost fantasy sports-like approach to motivate salespeople through “player cards,” profile pages showing people’s pictures, sales statistics, and grades on their hustle, diligence, preparation, and leadership. “For example, the hustle attribute on the back of the card is a reflection of how many deals they closed, how many calls they made, how much revenue they brought in,” Rolling says. Even if a salesperson does the work, if they don’t track it in the system their attribute scores will be negatively affected. “So now all of a sudden they have an incentive to use the CRM and use it properly because it’s a personal branding platform for them now.”

The company has added related features to further connect to team members’ competitive spirits, including 1-on-1 and group matchups between representatives (with the latter helping promote a healthier work environment if competition starts negatively impacting team morale). The app will also help sales reps be more efficient with their time using tools such as route mapping to reduce windshield time (the time wasted commuting to clients), inventory management, and sales and account mapping to identify new leads and help discover regional insights.

Outfield also is working on a feature allowing for integrations with charitable organizations, where salespeople can select which organization they wish to support as they reach certain performance targets. This is meant to appeal to millennials, in particular. According to Outfield’s in-house market research, this group of workers is more likely to take action or complete a task “if you can attach a purpose to what it is that they’re doing,” the CEO says. “If the sales reps don’t use the tool properly, then the result is the manager doesn’t get the value that they hope to get out of the solution.”

Analytics for Managers

The demographics of the cannabis industry are partly what make Rolling believe his company can make a lasting impact. “The thing that I like the most about the cannabis space is, from what we’ve seen, most of the sales teams are made up of millennials. That’s our sweet spot,” Rolling says.

When field sales teams report dispensary visit results on the app, cannabis sales managers can review those call forms to verify how the visit went and whether there are any action items the company needs to address. It can also provide learning opportunities between the manager and customer-facing team members. “You can essentially take a person’s visit, understand what they did, who they spoke with, and what they accomplished at a particular event,” Rolling explains. But more importantly, “you can also aggregate that across all of that individual’s activities,” or by territory/region.

For example, if a sales rep seems to be missing out on budtender education opportunities based on their field reports, the sales manager can send them an in-app message reminding them to mention certain product features or new launches during their next trips. Likewise, aggregated team data can reveal “the different nuances from one market to another that’ll help you retarget and remarket to those territories,” Rolling says.

Outfield currently offers two different payment models. It offers a monthly SaaS fee subscription model starting from $14.99 per user per month, with pricing escalating depending on added features as well a performance based pricing plan, a combination of a base plus variable compensation. “You can think of it similar to a compensation plan that most salespersons are accustomed to. They receive a based salary in addition to a performance based variable,” Rolling explains.

Catching Up on Cannabis

As Outfield expands into cannabis, Rolling is learning of the industry’s quirks and adapting the company’s approach. While only about 10% of the company’s clients hail from cannabis and/or CBD, “a huge percentage of our new customer base is coming from that space,” Rolling says. 

“One of the things that we learned was that the cannabis space is very closely knit. Everybody talks, right? So you have to protect your brand and you have to create a service that people will have an appreciation for.” The company’s pricing models are a reflection of that flexibility and willingness to meet people where they are.

“The volatility around the cannabis space right now makes a lot of our customers hesitant to go out on longer contracts beyond a year, usually,” he shares. “These guys don’t know if they’re gonna be in business a year from now, or if they may get acquired or something like that.”

Despite its growth in cannabis coming mostly from simple word-of-mouth, Outfield already boasts of The Parent Company and Sumo Snacks (a Snoop Dogg brand), and Autumn Brands as clients. As a fairly new player in the cannabis space, Outfield is still working on integrations with other platforms. “If we can tie ourselves into a POS system so that we can get some of that sell-through data, just trying to understand correlations between the sales rep going into these dispensaries and understanding that, it’ll just be some phenomenal information to have,” combined with Outfield.

However, that process needs to be done carefully considering that the company operates in other industries. But that is also one of the platform’s strengths: having a diversified client base means Outfield can better shield itself from the cannabis industry’s volatility, potentially giving it more staying power in a mercurial market.

“We were adopted by the cannabis space, we didn’t actually go after cannabis customers,” Rolling says. “We are now because we’re realizing that there’s a synergistic opportunity.”