Sales Route Planning: What is it and Why Do I Need It?
Time spent doing anything other than selling is time wasted. If you feel like you or your reps are running out of time in the day to sell, route planning may be the reason.
Having a software to plan your sales routes is the best way to make sure your entire sales day is well spent and you’re not wasting time looking in the wrong areas for customers. If you don’t know where to start with route planning, see what it is, how it works, it’s benefits, and where to find the best route planner for you and your company before you waste more time.
What is a Route Planner?
Route planning is a specialized software designed to find the optimal means of traveling between two or more given locations. With route planning, sales reps will be able to optimize their time so they can visit more customers leading to a significant increase in deals won and customer satisfaction.
How Route Planning Works
Adding a route planner to your sales process is essential to sell smarter not harder. Inefficient travel hurts sales teams because it raises costs and lowers revenue.
You’re losing money if reps and closers aren’t getting to as many prospects as they could in a day. With a good route planner, your teams can plan their day, get to more appointments, and lower their travel costs. Here are some examples of the most popular route planning methods:
Cloverleafing:
When you’re cloverleafing, you’re focused on high value engagements with current customers, appointments, or hot leads. Since you know where all these people live, use that information to plan out your day. Build a route out of each primary destination for the day, and use it to plan out your movements.
Referral Work:
When you collect a series of referrals from a customer or prospect, you can quickly plug them all into a route and efficiently visit all of them. This is especially useful when you have several referrals from several different sources. Just plug them all in, create a route, and visit them all quickly.
Setter/Closer Model:
If you’re operating with setters and closers, routing is a great way to get the most out of your closers. Closers usually travel a lot, so make sure they use routing to hit their destinations as fast and efficiently as possible.
Even if you don’t feel the need to implement one of these specific approaches, being deliberate with travel time will make an instant impact on the efficiency of your sales teams.
The Benefits of Using Route Planning Software
According to a study by Salesforce, 66% of sales team members spend time doing non-sales activities and 45% of mobile workers have wasted significant time because of inaccurate lead information. If this sounds like your reps, adding a route planning software will quickly solve this problem. With an effective route planner you’ll be able to:
- Work with more accurate lead information.
- Maximize reps time by getting to the lead in the most efficient way with turn-by-turn navigation.
- Visit and manage more leads in less time.
- Increase the opportunity to close more deals.
How to Find the Best Route Planner
Having a successful route planner doesn’t have to break the bank. If you feel like you’re wasting time and resources by not accurately tracking your leads, invest in a route planner to do the thinking for you.
While SalesRabbit’s full app may not be free, we offer a version of SalesRabbit that gives you the capability to set appointments with reminders, add and filter leads, and route planning all for free.
When used in sync with our Lead Tracking tools, the Routing feature is a powerful tool and can supplement strategic canvassing approaches. Using a free route planner will significantly boost your sales organization, it’s not a feature you want to skip out on.