You can’t expect potential customers to come to you like it’s Field of Dreams. You’ve got to send people out to find potential customers and convince them to start doing business with you. The success of your company will be determined by the performance of your field sales reps.
So, if your company’s fate depends on field sales rep performance, what can you do to make your field sales reps more productive?
Using a trip planner instead of planning routes manually is an easy way to increase efficiency. Your reps are more skilled at the art of persuasion than the art of getting from Point A to Point B, right? If you just tell them which addresses they need to go to, there’s a good chance that the route they choose won’t be the most efficient route possible. They’ll take more time than necessary to complete their routes, which means they’ll visit fewer prospects than they could have.
Even if you try to design their routes for them, there’s a good chance that the routes you come up with aren’t the most efficient routes possible. Route planning is complicated – on top of figuring out which roads your drivers should take to reach their destinations, you also need to consider traffic, weather, construction, and many other factors.
A trip planer takes all those factors into account for you. You’ll be able to provide your drivers with more efficient routes, which will result in more visits and more sales.
Make Sales Reps More Productive
Route optimization software ensures that your salespeople show up on time, in the quickest time and at the shortest distance possible. They’ll be calmer and more dynamic when they get to a client because you gave them the correct directions. Moreover, whenever you use routes that are optimized and the most efficient, you save fuel and reduce vehicle maintenance and repair costs.
Also, the best route planners come with a territory optimizer feature that helps you segment your team into different regions. In this way, each sales rep can make a series of stops that are relatively close together. This grouping of your clients means that your sales reps can visit more clients in less time.
The route planner further more enables you to draw a territory, name the territory, choose a color for its display on the map, save regions as groups, and plan routes based on region selections.
You can add an unlimited number of territories by repeating this process. And, you can draw overlapping territories and hide or display specific territories on the map. Route4Me even comes with a color coding feature which allows you to mark your leads, prospects, and customers by color to segment leads that have a higher chance of conversion.
Moreover, a road trip planner offers a GPS tracking feature that helps you learn where your sales team is no matter where they are or where you are. When your reps know they’re being ‘watched’, they’ll be more likely to follow your routes to a ‘T’ and so they’ll almost always get to clients on time.
Knowing that they’re being monitored also minimizes reckless driving behavior. And, in the event that they get into an accident, you can find out quickly about the situation, using the software, and get a reliever or team to help them out.
All these features help sales reps visit more clients per day, resulting in more sales.
Minimize Paperwork
You would normally have to ask your team to carry around a logbook or confirmation slips to document their times of arrival, discussion points, times of departure, and maybe even your client’s signatures to ensure that the reps are actually on sales meetings.
Doing all this manually can create problems because writing all the data down takes time. Moreover, what if the sales reps decide to fill in the paperwork only when they get back to the office? Important information might surely be left out or forgotten. Also, what if they lose a confirmation slip? Could you take your employee’s word as truth that they indeed visited the client?
Since trip planner has geofencing technology integrated, it lets you know at what times your employees arrived at and departed from your clients’ or prospects’ locations. So, instead of lugging around such sheafs of paper confirmation slips, you can allow your sales reps to focus on closing deals by using a trip planner.
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
Moreover, if reps would like to give feedback as to their last meetings, they can do so quickly by using the Add Notes function of the software. They don’t even have to go back to the office to let you know of all these updates; you’ll know in real time.
Robust Performance Management System
You might want to award your best salespeople with promotions or bonuses. This will certainly incentivize them to do well at work. And, while you can do this by only using the actual converted sales, you can also use other criteria. Such criteria could include the number of prospects visited in a day, and the most improved. This would give you a more robust performance management system.
And, to be more transparent regarding your process for promotions or bonuses, you can use the data collected by a trip planner. With the data, you can pull out any criteria you’d like to compare, such as the number of clients visited, the number of prospects visited, and the most number of clients served. Your sales team would appreciate that you’re taking a more objective look at their work. In addition, no one would feel frustrated or demoralized because you’re basing promotions and bonuses on actual work and not on a gut feeling. Furthermore, when your sales team is upbeat, it would show through their work ethic.
What approaches have you been using to empower your sales team? Do you have any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Also, here are a few questions to ensure you understood how a trip planner can empower your sales fleet:
- What are the positive outcomes of tracking your sales fleet?
- Why is it important that you minimize your sales team’s paperwork?
- How can you ensure that your promotion process is fair and objective?
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
