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. 

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:

1. Automate Sales Data Integration and Route Optimization

Like we mentioned above, planning out sales rep routes by hand has real limitations. Sure, you can eyeball a sensible route most of the time, but you certainly can’t test out dozens or hundreds of different route options to model which ones will be most efficient. 

That’s where the right technology comes in: rather than relying on domain knowledge and being limited by the number of hours in a day, automated routing tools are able to rapidly optimize routes by analyzing thousands of potential route permutations in minutes. When you remove the manual effort from this process, 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. 

One of the keys here is to make sure you have all the right data in the right places. You don’t want manual data entry between your ERP, PoS, or sales management software into your routing software to slow down the process. Find a solution that can automate data transfer between your different solutions to streamline the process. 

2. Update Your Territories Frequently 

Once you’ve sped up sales rep route planning with automated route optimization technology, you can suddenly build much more flexibility and adaptability into your processes. 

Take sales territory planning as an example. Generally, it’s a process that takes so much time to do by hand that businesses are loath to do it more than a couple of times each year. But when your routing is automated, you can significantly cut down the amount of manual effort that goes into revamping your sales territories to ensure efficiency as well as equal selling potential. 

This means that you can adapt that much more quickly to changes in your market, customer base, and team. We recommend transitioning from a twice a year model to an “as-needed” model—as long as you have the software to support it. 

3. Leverage a Mobile App for Connectivity

Routing isn’t the end-all-be-all of the sales and field services management process. Ideally, your sales reps would be making stops as part of a connected process that other teams have visibility into throughout. 

The best way to make this happen is to pair your routing capabilities with a sales rep mobile application that enables you to track route progress in real time. In this way, you can see what’s happening along each sales rep route, including status, location, and ETA to the next stop. 

Your team can even leverage 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 made instantly visible within your larger solution—so that you can see whether your routes are actually working as intended.

4. Ensure Coordination Between Sales and Delivery Management

One of the other benefits of leveraging a mobile app that’s connected to your sales rep route planner is that it can empower improved visibility and coordination between teams. You might be working in an industry where it’s common practice for a sales rep to arrive at the delivery site with the delivery truck to schmooze with the customer and handle any potential issues or concerns—in those cases, it’s crucial that sales and delivery teams be able to keep tabs on one another’s locations and activities. 

Ultimately, the sales and delivery functions are part of the same cohesive whole—sometimes that’s literally true, and your drivers are also sellers—and your route planning process should reflect that. 

5. Use the Right Sales Rep Route Planner

Really, using the right sales rep route planner is step one. But we’ve put it towards the bottom of the checklist because you can use all of the above as guideposts for determining what the right sales rep route planner actually is. 

Not all route optimization solutions are created equal. If you’re trying to improve the productivity of your sellers and boost visibility across your broader operations, there are a few things you should look for in the right sales rep route planner:

• Fast, AI-powered capabilities to save your route planners time
• A connected mobile application that ensures connectivity with sales reps in the field
• Connectivity between sales routing and delivery/service routing so that different teams can gain insights into one another’s activities
• Real-time tracking as sales reps complete their routes and status updates as they move from stop to stop
• Automated sales data import 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, and 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 software. Our platform is built on robust route optimization capabilities that are designed to meet the challenges of a large number of different use cases, including sales rep route planning. 

Our platform offers:

• Fast, flexible route optimization so that you can ensure the most efficient, up-to-date routes across the board
• A separate sales rep mobile app for ensuring connectivity and visibility across teams
• Comprehensive last mile logistics capabilities that ensure total logistics visibility and seamless integration between routing and the rest of your technology and processes

The result of leveraging these capabilities is that businesses improve productivity, speed up route planning, and ultimately improve the level of service they offer to customers and prospects. 

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