I would like to learn about tools to supervise sales people that spend most of their time visiting customers. I would like to have a way to measure productivity other than how much each salespeople have sold.

What type of sales reports do they generate, stops made, lists of contacts seen, Number of face to face sales opportunities

There are many tools and ways to subjugate your sales staff, not what you want to do. I have always believed that if a sales person needs too much control they are not cut out for sales. Most successful sales persons are free spirits and have a fire burning intrinsically to succeed. For many reasons: wealth, honor, ego, status, pride, family, maybe all these reasons and more, each is an individual... Give a wide berth to the right people to be creative, be themselves. You are responsible to hire the right person for the job, do that and you personally will have found success also. A good sales manger leads from behind.

Now that being said, the primary thing that I track are: (#"s 2, 3 and 4 are calculated percentages:)

1. Number of calls in a given period.
2. Appointments to calls: What percentage of appointments were granted to the number of calls.
3. Bids/proposals to appointments: Ditto
4. Closes/sales to bid ratio: Ditto

These percentages alone will give you a close insight to the individual. Be ready AND accessible when they need and ask for help, provide sales materials and POS. Try not to control, not easy, I know. While learning this lesson, I lost a few very good sales people over the years.

If I can help further, please advise,

Stringer

Get a contact management program - goldmine, salesmaster, and review their input daily.
Remember always the 80/20 rule... 20% of the reps always do 80% of the business... same applies to inventory etc.
Good luck.
P.S. sales supervision/coaching is tough - get the best performers to show the others how it's done but incent them to do it - don't make the mistake of making them managers.

Kak