Sales route planning helps identify the most efficient route from one customer to the next. Such efficient route planning enables field sales reps to navigate and capitalize on prospects in that area. A strategy is necessary to optimize your daily logistics to improve sales potential and convert prospects into long-term customers.
5 Effective Sales Route Planning Strategies
Here are top five effective ways to smartly optimize your sales route planning.
1. Leverage Location Based Customer Insights
Geospatial analytics helps identify potential customers in a geographic region. You can do this by leveraging data points and demographics including age, occupation, income level, and gender. Data points can also be taken from analytics focusing on customer behavior and individual preferences.
Analyzing this aggregated data will provide better insights into customer groups and the competition. Once you identify the customer, it’s easier to align business goals with target clusters that show the most sales potential.
This helps sales reps with effective route planning and scheduled visits. Even factors like live traffic patterns and customer location tracking enables them to reduce travel time.
2. Use Efficient Route Planning Software
Manually maintaining spreadsheets becomes cumbersome when you have a large sales team. Using a robust field force management software can help reps to plan their day effectively. It consolidates information on a single platform to improve efficient management of sales reps.
For example, a field sales management software runs dynamic algorithms to simulate best routes using real-time data. It also suggests efficient transport modes to reach a prospect. It’ll also consider factors like traffic, roadblocks, and zones to avoid ways to reach quickly. Leveraging the software, it’s easier to track representatives in the field in real-time. They also send contextual nudges to reps about nearby leads and help with faster customer reach out.
3. Review Lead Allocations
Sales reps manage several customer calls and visits in a day. You need to identify their workload and allocate leads accordingly. Once a route planning software is up and running, this task will be simplified, allowing your business to optimize sales representative’s daily activities.
Review workload by focusing on:
- Customer locations to visit for the workday using geospatial sites and data
- Sales strategy to implement and achieve individual and collective targets
- Setting prioritized calls to convert the best available leads into customers
- Accounting for non-sales times where reps don’t need to be in the field
- Having a backup sales strategy in case existing appointments get canceled or rescheduled
The software also allows you to track and guide all field sales teams efficiently. It configures the fastest, safest, and most reliable routes.
Route Planning helps you visualize:
- A beat plan to reach potential customers
- Use data to automate and simplify manual planning tasks
- Unlock potential territories
- Optimize field sales rep time
- Create a balanced workload for field reps
4. Optimize and Automate Lead Conversion
Identifying the right sales reps for a particular customer can lead to better conversion rates. Dista suggests using the S.P.A.C.E framework guideline to supercharge your lead distribution. The framework focuses on skills of field sales reps, proximity of leads, availability of reps, capacity of jobs, and experience of reps to smartly allocate tasks.
A comprehensive field sales management tool matches the best skilled sales reps to priority leads in a mapped territory. Further, leads are distributed based on their proximity, availability, and workload to ensure equitable distribution of work. Dista Sales primarily works on this framework to respond faster to leads. Field reps can avoid missing out on leads simply because they weren’t accounted for efficiently.
5. Strategize Sales with a Smart Beat Plan
Sales representatives can also follow up on multiple leads and close more deals with an active beat plan. Boost your lead conversions, enable faster lead actions, increase productivity, drive sales, automate processes, and gain impactful insights with a beat planning tool. An active beat plan also eliminates any sales territory overlap that leads to wastage of time and resources. Use visual data points and monitor updates in real time with a trusted and reliable field sales management platform. Geospatial analytics provides location centric customer data that you can leverage to prioritize and sequence these sales rep visits.
Final Thoughts
Businesses can leverage the Dista Sales, our field sales management system to automate and optimize sales routes. Improve route planning with timely lead management and automated workflows.
Get in touch with us to see our platform live in action.
