Elevon in ForbesWhy This Venue and Why Now, Answered Before the Rep Knocks
Field sales in the hospitality segment runs on two questions: which venue to visit, and what to say when you get there. We prototyped both answers: a desktop territory view where venues are scored and filtered by archetype, and a mobile view with the rep's day plan and a visit log designed to take tens of seconds. Anonymized, on sample data, sent as part of the offer.
Client
Beverage company
Industry
Food & hospitality
Solution
Territory intelligence and a rep's mobile view (prototype)
Deployment
Interactive prototype
Part of an offer, not a delivered project. Venue names, districts, brands and contacts on the screens are invented.
The Brief
A field rep's week is a routing problem with bad inputs. There are more venues in a territory than anyone can visit, the list of them is usually a spreadsheet with a name and an address, and the decision about where to go next is made from memory and habit. The cost of that is invisible: it shows up as visits to venues that were never going to buy.
The second problem is the conversation itself. A rep who walks in without knowing the venue's price level, who supplies it today, or how the category is talked about locally has to spend the first minutes discovering all of it. The information exists in publicly available sources, but not in a shape anyone can use on the way to the door.
And there is a third, quieter problem: whatever the rep learns during the visit usually stays with the rep. Any logging that takes minutes does not happen in the field, which means the territory never gets smarter from being worked.
How We Designed It
The whole prototype is built around one question a rep should be able to answer before knocking: why this venue, and why now.
A score and a brief, not a longer list
Each venue carries a B2B score from 0 to 100 and a pre-visit brief. The signals behind them come from publicly available data: price bands, sentiment towards the category, and who supplies the venue today: including the white spots where no supplier is known, which are often the most interesting rows in the table.
A visit log measured in tens of seconds
Fourteen chips in three groups plus a free-text note. No forms, no dropdowns, no typing unless the rep has something worth writing. If logging a visit takes minutes, it does not get done, and everything built on top of that data stops working.
Two surfaces over one dataset
The desktop view is for planning a territory: six KPIs, archetype filters, a sortable table of venues and a detail panel with seven sections. The mobile view is the same data shaped for a day in the field. The score that orders the table is the score that orders the rep's day.
How Delivery Would Run
The desktop prototype is the territory view: six KPIs above a table of twenty-four venues, each with a B2B score, sortable by one click, filterable by venue archetype: traditional, modern specialty, tourist hub, premium, chain. Selecting a venue opens a detail panel with seven sections: the pre-visit brief, the intelligence behind the score, price level, frequency and operation, digital presence, equipment, and the contact.
The mobile prototype is the rep's day: a plan of seven visits with time, distance, score and brief for each, the visit log with its fourteen chips, a team feed so the field learns from itself, and a dashboard with an adoption chart, KPIs, a rep ranking and a before-and-after comparison. All of it on sample data: the dashboard is there to show the shape of the reporting, not any measured effect.
Delivery would start with the scoring and the data sources behind it, because that is where the whole thing is either credible or not. The rep's mobile view is the second step and the smaller one: the day plan and the visit log are simple screens whose value depends entirely on the score being right. The team feed and the dashboard come last, since they need real logged visits before they show anything.
What this looks like in practice
The client sorts the table by score, filters it down to one archetype, and opens the top venue. The detail panel answers why it is at the top: its price level, who supplies it today, how the category is talked about nearby, what equipment it has, and who to ask for. Then they switch to the mobile view and see the same venue as the first stop of a seven-visit day, with the same brief in the rep's hand.
Territory intelligence
Anonymized preview, running on blind sample data.
What the Prototype Proves
This is a prototype, so there is nothing deployed to report on. What the client can check by clicking is this.
Twenty-four venues with a B2B score from 0 to 100, sortable by one click
Five venue archetypes as filters, so a territory can be worked one segment at a time
A seven-section detail panel that answers why this venue and why now
Signals drawn from publicly available data, including the white spots with no known supplier
A day plan of seven visits with time, distance, score and brief for each
A visit log of fourteen chips in three groups plus a note, designed for tens of seconds
The shape of the reporting the client would get: adoption chart, KPIs, rep ranking, before and after
Why We Send a Prototype, Not a Deck
A scoring system is only worth as much as its explanation. A rep who does not believe the score ignores the list and goes back to habit, and no amount of dashboard fixes that. Which is why the prototype leads with the reasons rather than the number: the detail panel exists to make the score arguable, and a client can test that in a minute by opening the top venue and disagreeing with it.
The visit log is the other thing worth seeing rather than describing. Everybody agrees in principle that field data should be captured; the disagreement is always about how much effort that is allowed to take. Fourteen chips and a note is an answer you can try with your thumb, and it either feels fast enough or it does not.
Sending this instead of a deck also changes what the first meeting is about. Nobody spends it agreeing that field sales could be more data-driven. The conversation goes straight to the scoring inputs, the archetypes and which parts of the territory to start with, which is the conversation that actually decides whether the project is worth doing.
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