It’s 2016. A couple decades ago, the only tools salespeople had to help them with their jobs were a Rolodex and a dogeared copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now, though, there are all kinds of tools you can use to identify prospects and close sales. A sales routing app is among the most effective of these tools.
Such an app allows you to meet more customers, and it also strengthens your sales process by giving you the ability to monitor and analyze data.
Sales routing apps offer other benefits as well, such as…
#1 Meet Your Customers On Time Without Fail
If you want to convince a prospect to buy your product/services, the very least you can do is show up on time.
Being punctual proves your commitment to the prospect. It shows that you value their time, which makes it much more likely that they’ll do business with you.
It can be difficult to show up on time, though. Even if you plan ahead, you might hit some unexpected traffic, or you might forget about some construction project clogging up a major highway along your sales route.
A route planner can help you here. Route4Me helps map multiple locations. It accounts for all the factors involved in the complicated process of sales route planning, so you don’t have to.
That’ll save time and money – planning routes manually can take hours to do by hand, but Route4Me produces 100% geographically optimized routes with accurate driving directions in less than 30 seconds, no matter how many stops you have to make. Route optimization software guarantees that you won’t have to deal with any unnecessary delays, so you can get to your prospects on time and keep them happy. It will make your sales route more efficient and more productive.
Route4Me is as easy to use as it is powerful: all you need to do is upload the addresses of the destinations you need to visit, and our fully automated route planner software handles the rest. You can use our software to map and route unlimited contacts.
#2 Locate Untapped Areas
Expanding your business is always a risky endeavor. It usually costs a good chunk of capital to expand somewhere, and if there’s less demand for your products/services in that somewhere than you expected, you’ll have wasted a lot of time and a lot of money.
What if you could know exactly how much money you’d make from expansion before you invested any money in the actual expansion? That way, you wouldn’t have to waste any money on something that’s not worth it.
A sales routing app allows you to do just that. Route4Me comes with an interactive map feature that shows you where you’re doing well and where you’re, uh, not doing so well. It’ll also show you how much it would cost to expand into a given area, taking into account all the factors involved, such as the price of gas and the wages of your workers. It’s a great tool to generate sales appointment leads.
#3 Access Important Information Anytime You Need It
Every account is different. Some clients might give you specific instructions that you’ll need to write down so that you can refer back to it later. And even when there are no specific instructions, it’s always a good idea to take note of important details about a client so that you impress them by remembering everything from your last conversation the next time you talk.
But how do you keep track of this information? You could write it on a piece of paper, but it’s easy to lose a piece of paper.
Route4Me has a solution for this situation – our software has an “Add Note” feature that enables your salespeople to add and update notes in real-time. You can also write and review the notes from your smartphone and include images with your notes to add context.
To top it all off, all these notes are centralized, so you and your sales team can access them at any time from anywhere.
#4 Identify Prospects Who Are Ready To Buy
Why waste your time on prospects who are unlikely to buy? You’ll make more money if you focus on hot leads… and wouldn’t you know it, Route4Me’s route mapping software has a color-coding feature that allows you to identify hot and cold leads from just a quick glance at your map.
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#5 Stronger Territory Management
Managing a large field sales team can be difficult, especially when they’re scattered across a large area.
The most efficient way to meet the maximum amount of prospects in this scenario is to separate your sales reps into different regions so that each sales rep’s set of stops is relatively close together. When clients are grouped closer together, your sales reps can visit more clients in the same time period, and visiting more clients, of course, means you’ll make more sales.
Route4Me has a sales territory mapping feature that allows you to draw a territory, name the territory, choose a color for its display on the map, save regions as groups, and plan sales routes based on the selected addresses. You can add an unlimited number of territories. You can even draw overlapping territories and hide or display a specific territory on the map.
Also, some sales reps may work in locations with a high density of clients and have to work overtime to meet them all. Others may be working in a territory that has relatively few customers, so they end up having too little work.
A map route planner will help you find the right balance. With just the click of a button, this tool can easily divide up your workload equally among the territories to ensure the demands of each area are met.
#6 Track Your Sales Reps
Sales reps are mostly unsupervised, so when they’re out on the job billing you for hours, they may be using some of that travel time to go shopping, visit friends, or do something else that addresses their personal wants rather than your business needs.
This is unacceptable. Every minute lost is a minute that could have been used to pursue prospects and close sales.
You don’t need to worry about this, though, when you use vehicle route planning software that comes with a GPS tracking feature.
For example, Route4Me’s GPS tracking helps sales managers monitor where their sales reps are in real-time, with only a 60-second delay. Managers can ensure that reps stay on their routes and don’t make any personal stops on company time. If a sales rep’s device goes offline, Route4Me’s system will automatically upload their GPS trace as soon as they regain internet access. You will have total control over your sales operations and also can save on fuel costs.
#7 Measure Your Capability To Manage A Large Client
Getting a large client gives your sales figures and your reputation a serious boost.
But if this large client’s needs turn out to be too much for you to handle, those financial benefits will quickly come to an end, and it’ll really hurt your reputation. It makes you look weak and unprofessional when you can’t manage to serve a client. It’s better to just never work with the client at all in this scenario.
So, you need to evaluate whether you’re really able to serve a large client before you commit to them. Ask yourself the following questions: Does my current fleet have room to grow? Can my sales reps squeeze in extra stops each day?
If you can answer yes to both questions, then there should be no problem with taking on the new big client. However, if the answer to both questions is no, then you should move on and let the client go with someone else.
Remember that feature that allows you to explore untapped areas and see how much it would cost you to expand? Well, you could use that capability in this scenario too and see how much it would cost you in man-hours, fuel expenses, etc. to visit the set of addresses a potential new client would need you to visit.
Route4Me shows you whether an opportunity is worth it or not. It takes the guesswork out of business.
Our sales routing app also offers the following features:
- Every contact in your address book appears on the map
- You can add as many custom fields and columns as you want per contract record, and this custom data automatically shared with all mobile users
- You can add administrators, sales managers, and territory managers, with each user being able to track, analyze, and manage all the users who report to them
- Real-time dynamic ETAs ensure that, when your field sales reps use Route4Me’s mobile app, the ETA for each stop is updated instantly as your reps progress through their sales route and encounter obstacles during the day, so your clients always know when they should expect you to arrive
- Real-time reporting and analytics presents detailed data in a simplified format so that you can actually make sense of it
- Helps you plan your day in advance before sales reps hit the road
- Makes it easy to share changes to sales routes with your drivers even after they’ve hit the road, as every change you make on your desktop or laptop in the office is synchronized with your drivers’ smartphones
What do you look for in a sales routing app? How do you map your sales route? Let us know in the comments section below.
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