Sales people spend much of their day on the road. Daily route planning and optimisation ensures that they can make better, more efficient use of their time. This not only results in increased sales, but has other business benefits too.
We asked David Lubinsky, director of logistics software company OPSI Systems, to explain how maximising the kilometres travelled can boost a sales team’s performance.
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Q: How can routing and scheduling software optimise the sales process?
It’s all about cutting costs and saving time. The ability to plan and manage trips for teams of sales people who visit customers regularly maximises efficiency at three levels – strategic, tactical and operational.
Route planning software comes with features that help managers assess their operations quickly and create improved solutions.
Q: How does it work?
Territory management and route planning software enables you to define regions and territories, identify how many resources are needed, and also calculate the cost of new sales strategies such as upping the frequency of visits to certain customers, for example.
Based on several possible service patterns, you can determine which is the best set of days on which to visit customers. Assigning customers to sales reps and sequencing those customers along the route is also simple to plan.
Essentially, the sales manager can design the visit plan for each coming cycle, whether it is weekly, monthly or quarterly.
At an operational level, route optimisation can reduce the number of kilometres travelled, which saves costs on vehicle maintenance, fuel and toll roads. It also allows for the workload to be shared fairly among sales consultants.
Q: What value does scenario planning offer?
It enables you to answer questions like:
- How many extra resources (people) will I need if I add 20 minutes to each customer call?
- What will the impact be of visiting customers twice instead of three times per week?
- Where would be the best place to hire a new resource?
- If I kept the customer visit days fixed, could I reassign the customers to resources more effectively?
- Would allowing my staff to sleep out enable me to service my customers better?
Q: What types of features are available?
Depending on the software you choose, there are several features that help to reduce costs by enabling sales people to better use their time, and to reduce the distances travelled.
Here are examples of features to look out for:
- Daily routing that can be done from the homes of sales people, a central site or a sleep-out location.
- Planning that allows for the inclusion of lunch breaks and regular meetings.
- The ability to restrict the number of customers of a particular type allocated to any one sales person on any day.
- Territory cutting options, which can be used to define service territories – based on geographical location – to balance workload against distance within the territories, so that sales calls are shared equally.
- The ability to prevent certain customer types from being seen by the same resource or to ensure customers in different channels/tiers are seen by a resource with the correct skills.
- The pre-assignment of visit days and resources to customers. This reduces disturbance to existing operations by maintaining consistency in the assignments.
- Modelling of on-route sleep-outs, including limits on the total number of sleep-outs in a period, and the maximum consecutive number and permitted sleep-out days. The sleep-out cost can be used to determine when it is cost-effective to stay out at the end of a day’s work.
Reducing costs may not be your only goal, so workload balance and other objectives can be specified with different importance weights.
Q: What real-world benefits have your customers experienced?
In sales territories that are managed manually, there is often a huge variation in workload, with some sales people being allocated 120 hours of work, while others have to do 200 hours.
That can have a serious impact on performance, as those with fewer hours spent on the road achieve more than those who waste time travelling extra kilometres.
Farming sales calls out more equitably also has a positive impact on staff morale, which in turn, yields enhanced performance.
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We have shown that companies can cut 10% of the kilometres travelled simply by ensuring that visits are not sequenced in random order. In addition, we have helped enterprises like SAB Miller, Distell, Brandhouse and Famous Brands to reduce the total number of kilometres travelled by their fleet by up to 20%, simply with proper routing.
Customer service is also improved because you can give your clients an estimated time of arrival, monitor visits that have been missed, and keep a check on service levels. There is an important people management component to this type of solution, which is particularly useful when it comes to measuring sales performance.
