5 Steps to More Effective Sales Rep Route Planning

In a recent HubSpot report, sales productivity tools were ranked second (behind only sales management tools) in terms of the best ROI for sales-related technology. We’d argue that anything that enables sellers to spend more time selling and less time on other tasks should fall into that category—meaning that the potential ROI for a sales rep route planner is potentially quite high.

After all, the less time sales reps spend on the road between stops, the more of their time they’re able to spend on what really matters: developing and maintaining relationships with prospects and customers. While sales routes aren’t necessarily as difficult to optimize as delivery routes (for one thing, delivery routes often involve many more stops per day and a more complex set of parameters), there’s still huge value to be gained by ensuring that your sales personnel are making the shortest, most-efficient trips and doing the optimal sequence of stops. 

For businesses where sellers spent significant time on the road—whether that’s because they double as delivery or service personnel or simply because it’s a high-touch environment—it’s becoming increasingly clear that manual sales rep route planning doesn’t cut it. Not in a world where automated, intelligent, AI-powered sales rep route planners exist. 

The average sales rep spends a quarter to a third of every hour driving between appointments, so using route planning technology to reclaim some of that time is an obvious performance booster. Every minute saved on the road is another minute spent doing what sales reps do best: connecting with prospects and closing deals.

If you’re in the market to potentially improve your sales reps’ productivity and efficiency—and delight your customers and prospects with timely visits in the process—there are 5 key steps you need to take achieve that end:

Index:

1. Automate Sales Data Integration and Route Optimization
2. Update Your Territories Frequently
3. Leverage a Mobile App for Connectivity
4. Ensure Coordination Between Sales and Delivery Management
5. Use the Right Sales Rep Route Planner

What Are the Keys to Sales Rep Route Planning?

Speeding up transit time and synchronizing sales with delivery and dispatch teams is sales manager Nirvana. Like every other job, getting there requires the right tools and the right plan. Here are five key steps:

1. Automate Sales Data Integration and Route Optimization

Planning sales rep routes by hand has real limitations. Sure, you can eyeball a sensible route most of the time, but you can’t model dozens or hundreds of route options to discover which will be most efficient. 

AI-powered technology can. 

Rather than relying on organizational knowledge and being limited by the number of hours in a day, automated routing tools can analyze thousands of potential routes in minutes. When you remove the manual effort, you save time for your team and ensure that your sales reps are being dispatched routes that are actually efficient.

This means they spend less time on the road over the course of the day. Less drive time, more face time with customers.

To do that, you need the right data in the right places. Manual data entry between your ERP, PoS, or sales management software and your routing software slows down the process and can introduce errors. Find a solution that can automate data transfer between your different solutions to streamline the process. 

2. Update Your Territories Frequently 

Once you’ve streamlined sales rep route planning with automated route optimization technology, you can build much more flexibility into your processes. 

For example, manually planning sales territories takes so much time that businesses are reluctant to replan more than a couple of times a year. Re-mapping territories with balanced revenue potential for the sales reps while also preserving crucial customer relationships and optimizing efficiency can be done in hours rather than days. 

This allows you to adapt to changes in your market, customer base, and team rapidly. We recommend moving replanning from twice a year to as-needed—as long as you have the software to support it. 

3. Leverage a Mobile App for Connectivity

Ideally, your sales reps are not just driving from stop to stop talking to current or prospective customers. Their routes should be part of a connected sales-delivery-merchandising-follow up process that the other teams — dispatchers, loaders, drivers, sales managers—have visibility into.

A robust sales rep mobile app can enable the team to track the rep's route in real time so everyone can see what’s happening during the day. They can view the status, location and ETA to the next stop. 

Reps should be able to use the app to document sales calls, take or adjust orders, and communicate with the rest of the team as needed. Once this data is captured, it should be visible in your integrated routing solution so you can see whether your routes are working as intended.

4. Ensure Coordination Between Sales and Delivery Management

A powerful benefit of having a mobile app that’s integrated with your sales rep route planner is that it can improve coordination between teams: If the rep needs to be present during a delivery to talk to the customer or do some merchandising, the driver knows what time to meet the rep at that stop. 

Ultimately, sales and delivery are part of one cohesive whole—especially if your drivers are also sellers—and your route planning technology should reflect that reality. 

5. Use the Right Sales Rep Route Planner

Choosing the right sales rep route planner is actually the first step but the other four steps are listed above so you have a grasp of the capabilities you should be looking for:

• Fast, AI-powered capabilities to save your route planners time and iterate thousands of route variations to find the most efficient
• A connected mobile application that connects sales reps to the rest of the organization
• Two-way communication between sales routing and delivery/service routing so that your teams can follow each others' progress in real time
• Real-time tracking and status updates for reps and drivers
• Automatic import of sales data into the routing solution
• Robust integration between routing and other solutions, including comprehensive last mile logistics management capabilities 

The right solution will have all of these capabilities, it will be easy to implement and will have a track record of saving customers time and money with intuitive, purpose-built capabilities. 

Smarter Sales Rep Route Planning with DispatchTrack

DispatchTrack is the global leader in last mile logistics solutions. Our platform has robust, AI-powered route optimization capabilities that meet the challenges of many use cases, including sales rep route planning. 

DispatchTrack has:

• Comprehensive sales territory planning that can balance sales potential for reps while preserving key customer relationships and optimizing sales rep route efficiency
• A dedicated sales rep mobile app that ensures connectivity and visibility across teams
• Comprehensive last mile logistics capabilities integrated with your full tech stack from order-in through delivery, customer survey and reporting 

With these tools, you can reduce the time your reps waste on the road, improving their sales and revenue opportunities, while also increasing the efficiency of the entire operation. 

If you’re ready to boost the productivity of your sales reps with optimized sales rep route planning, reach out to one of our experts today to learn more.