Sales route planners help to increase efficiency and deliver better results by planning routes based on objective data. They also provide a backup call list so that if a client cancels or reschedules, they can re-optimize the day quickly.
A routing solution with lead generation capabilities is essential for increasing your sales pipeline. Here are the top benefits of doing so:
Improved Customer Service
Boosting customer service can be one of the most significant benefits your sales team can get from sales route planning. Providing better service can increase client retention, which is essential for your business to grow. When clients are satisfied with the level of service, they are more likely to spend money with your company and refer new business.
Sales route optimization software, like those in eSpatial, can help you improve customer service by reducing travel times and costs for your reps. This allows them to meet with more clients in a day and also to improve their overall performance.
Sales route planners typically allow you to import leads and customer data directly from your CRM platform and organize them into custom-designed territories on an interactive map. The software will then automatically find the best routes for each region based on priority, capacity, and geography.
With some customization, you can also use mapping software to create routes that prioritize your highest-value leads or select a particular order for meeting your current clients. This will ensure that your field sales reps can meet with their most valuable customers first, boosting their closing rate and sales value per hour and mile spent in the field.
A good routing app can help you make intelligent decisions for your sales team, with features like geolocation intelligence and seamless Salesforce integration that make it easy to manage sales information. Using these tools can give you the visibility you need to coach your sales team to success and ensure they follow up on all leads, respect time windows for planned meetings, and manage their client ownership efficiently and effectively.
Enhanced Efficiency
Using a sales route planner can save your field sales team time, which means more revenue-generating activities. For those who work on commission, every minute spent planning a route or driving is an opportunity lost to make sales.
Whether your reps are new to the business or have been selling for years, they probably spend more than half their day performing non-revenue-producing tasks like data entry and manual navigation. A sales routing app can help them focus on closing the deal instead of navigating to their next meeting or client.
Intelligent routing software provides flexibility in the field, allowing your team to change their schedule with the push of a button. They can re-plan their entire schedule for that day if they discover a crucial customer needs to be prioritized or running ahead of schedule and need to speed up the rest of their appointments.
Depending on your chosen routing app, you can also eliminate tedious manual data entry by importing CRM data directly to your sales routes. This will keep your sales team’s routes current and ensure they’re visiting clients at the correct times. Many sales route mapping apps automatically track your field sales reps’ mileage for quick and easy reimbursement. This can help them stay focused on delivering a high-quality customer experience.
Increased Revenue
For salespeople who work on commission, every minute they spend thinking about their route or driving is a moment not spent engaging in income-generating activities. Automated route planning tools can help increase productivity by eliminating the need to manually comb through spreadsheets and customer data, enabling reps to spend more time cultivating new leads, meeting with clients, and serving existing customers.
In addition to reducing travel costs (fuel, payroll, and rental vehicle expenses), optimizing routes also helps reduce overhead expenses by allowing reps to visit more clients per day. This increases the number and value of sales per trip and decreases the overall cost of operating a sales team, increasing revenue for the business.
Considering the many factors influencing field sales routes, effective sales route planners must be flexible and adaptable to changing conditions. This can include road closures, traffic jams, and inclement weather that may cause prospects or reps to miss meetings.
Sales route optimization software is an essential tool for any field sales team. Whether you want to improve customer service, drive efficiency, or expand your territory coverage, the best sales route planners offer game-changing features for your business, including geolocation intelligence, a unified platform for managing customer data, and sales engagement capabilities. Powered by machine learning algorithms and a company’s historical data, the best sales route planners can create optimized routes for your team that meet your sales objectives.
Increased Productivity
The haphazard scheduling and routing processes often associated with spreadsheets and traditional route planning software can cost sales teams valuable time. In addition to wasting resources on manual data entry and travel, they may miss meaningful sales opportunities due to a lack of insight into territories, market dynamics, or customer data. A sales route planner can help your team maximize their territory potential, improve productivity, and grow revenue by providing optimized routes that align with sales goals.
Using an intelligent routing app that integrates with your CRM, you can ensure your reps only meet with the right clients at the right time. You can set criteria for assigning meetings, such as location-based territories and overriding factors like high-value customers and previous interactions. Then, the best routes will be automatically created for your team based on their calendar and meeting schedules. You can even add live tracking to your application to see your team’s ETA and quickly adjust their routes in case of cancellations or postponements.
Identify your highest priority accounts by consulting a sales pipeline report. Then, prioritize your routes by analyzing the locations of each bill to determine if you can visit multiple accounts in one day or fill in gaps with lower-priority customers within the same geographic area. You can also set service time windows to decrease downtime and increase productivity when creating your routes.