In today’s fast-paced business world, every minute a sales representative spends on the road directly impacts your company’s bottom line.
In an increasingly competitive market, the efficiency of your field sales team depends entirely on proper planning and effective time management. This is where route control & planning come into play.
By creating an effective route plan, sales teams can reach the right customer at the right time and accelerate their progress toward sales targets.
What is Route?
A route basically refers to a specific path or direction between locations, while in field sales operations, it can be defined as a series of visits by field managers to deliver goods or collect returns.
Businesses establish their course in field operations in line with various strategic decisions. Some visit locations close to each other to save fuel and time, while others prioritize the businesses with the most earnings to increase sales efficiency.
But to ensure the best performance in field sales processes, it is necessary to collect all such strategies under one roof. The approach that enables this is route control.
What Is Route Control?
Route control refers to the process of monitoring and optimizing the daily course that sales teams use to reach their customers.
This process goes beyond traditional route planning, enabling a more detailed analysis of the process. While route planning typically means mapping out a day’s visits in sequence, route control ensures that every variable is taken into account.
These include constraints such as customer availability, representative schedules, traffic conditions, business priorities, and even delivery or payment collection requirements.
Unlike the static nature of classic planning, route control is dynamic. If a meeting is canceled or traffic conditions change, the system can re-optimize the road, allowing sales representatives to remain productive rather than waiting or re-routing.
In short, route control is the bridge between smart planning and seamless execution. For sales teams, this means spending more time with customers and less time on the road.
Advantages of Route Control to Sales Teams
Adopting an effective route control system provides many advantages that directly affect both sales results and operational efficiency. Let’s take a look at some of these together.
Time Saving
An optimized route plan allows agents to spend less time on the road, helping them to spend more time with customers. Research shows that advanced planning tools can achieve 30% more sales time, which translates directly into higher incomes.
Cost Saving
An efficient route control helps reduce time savings as well as unnecessary distances, fuel consumption, and vehicle failure costs across the field.
Manual route optimization makes the workforce more costly. Thereby, the manual planning processes carried out by the employees can be automated by route control.
Efficiency Increase
Route control saves time and cost and prohibits sales teams from having the chance to visit more customers in a single day. In this way, representatives can minimize missed opportunities while increasing both personal performance and organizational profitability.
Positive Customer Experience
The most demanded elements of customers in field sales are timely and successful service. Businesses can make the most strategic planning for their customers thanks to route control.
In this aspect, companies that provide a timely and more relevant service to customers can gain the trust of customers and gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.
High Coordination
Route controllers provide both sales teams and managers with live information about field activities. In this way, businesses can establish coordination between sales, logistics, and operations more efficiently.
5 Steps to Creating An Effective Route Plan
Long efforts and meticulous work are required to design an effective road plan that will optimize the day-to-day operations of your sales teams.
But by following these five structured steps, you can create efficient, flexible, and scalable plans for your sales teams.
1. Take out the Customer Map
For an effective route plan, everything starts with a proper customer analysis. For this reason, you should first map the geographical locations of all your existing and potential customers in detail for your field operations.
Clearly identifying the answers to questions such as how many customers are in which regions and how often they should be visited is the basis of your customer map.
Imagine that you are a field sales manager of a food distribution company. In the first phase of your road plan, you can mark all the grocery stores, markets, and restaurants in the area you are responsible for.
2. Set Priority Order
Sorting your customers is one of the most important steps of route planning. At this point, you can prioritize your visits according to criteria such as sales volume, potential value, or strategic importance and put your route in strategic order.
At this stage, customers with strategic importance for your business should be placed at the top of the list. For example, you can add your customer, who provides you with the most monthly turnover, to the top of your weekly visit list.
This can strengthen your relationship with your most important customers, and you will not miss out on potential sales opportunities.
3. Make Visit Ranking
After the customer map and priority ranking are completed, you should move to the stage of creating the most efficient route.
The ranking of visits designed at this stage should be optimized primarily based on distance and traffic situation. At this point, tools such as Google Maps or custom planning software will provide great convenience to your team.
4. Create Timeline
Creating a timeline for an effective route plan is vital. Which day should be worked on in which region, and estimated times of visits and breaks should be determined before field trips.
In this way, you can design each day of the field team according to your strategy, so you can make your field work from a spontaneous process into a planned and organized operation.
5. Update with Feedback
A route plan should never be stagnant. Field conditions can be constantly changing, new customers can be added, or some of them can be off your list. Therefore, you need to update your plan regularly with feedback from the field team.
For example, when a sales rep reports that a customer on the route should no longer be visited or wants to add a new potential customer, you should keep your system dynamic by projecting those changes into the plan.
Digital Solutions That Improve Route Optimization
Although route control provides many advantages and efficiency increases for sales teams, it is sometimes difficult to optimize these processes manually.
But there are now some digital solutions that stand out today to ensure accurate road plan optimization. Here are some of them:
CRM Integrated Route Software
One of the strongest supporters of sales optimization is route software that integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Such platforms allow sales teams to visualize their road on the field on a map, while at the same time helping to collect almost all data related to sales.
Managers perform sales control much more effectively and easily thanks to such platforms. Teams can do almost all their operations more efficiently with CRM.
Scenario Planning with Simulation Tools
Today’s advanced analytical and simulation tools offer companies the opportunity to predict the future. Thanks to these tools, “what if that happens?” scenarios can be easily tested.
For example, the addition of a new sales territory, different sales team distributions, or new road map models that will save fuel can be simulated in advance, and the ideal strategy can be determined.
With this proactive approach, you can be prepared for unexpected situations and make the most efficient use of resources.
Advanced Field Management with Logistics Software
Another important digital solution that increases the operational power of field teams is logistics modules. Such software optimizes not only the route of the sales teams, but also all the details of the operation.
As a matter of fact, logistics modules can be the most effective for teams to plan their route by taking into account the transport capacity limits, stock situation, instant traffic density, and field conditions.
In this way, the operations are carried out more efficiently in the short term and have a sustainable structure in the long term.
Strengthen Your Route Control with Octapull SFA Logistics Module
Manual logistics processes can cause the entire operation to fail, even with a small error.
That is why it is so important to take full control of your supply chain. You can upgrade your route planning processes with Octapull SFA Logistics Management Software. This all-in-one digital solution lets you manage your entire logistics process.
Facilitating every workflow, from shipments to documentation, from warehouse operations to your supply chain, this platform helps you increase operational efficiency from the moment an order is initiated to its final delivery. Octapull SFA’s logistics module is packed with features designed to make field operations more efficient.
You can make your delivery operations more visible with detailed shipment order creation and shipment tracking systems.
In addition, you can make our document work more secure and organized by serial number tracking based on the invoice and the delivery note. Moreover, with customer-specific document management, your field teams can easily access all files.
If you aim to gain a competitive advantage against your competitors by digitizing your field sales and route control processes, you can review Octapull SFA in more detail and schedule a demo meeting with our product team!
