Best way to get your salesman on track
Although tracing a good route schedule can be a painful task for a sales manager, it’s definitely a key factor for the organization of its commercial agents to achieve better results.
Since the routes of the agents have different variants to be considered, to achieve an optimal and effective route is not a straightforward task and there is a need to use a route optimization tool to grant the best results while keeping the commercial agents focused on their main function: selling by making more visits.
One of the classic issues for vendors is that they don’t have enough time to sell because it’s tricky to balance their time between answering calls, or trying to resolve incidents that arise to customers (like mistakes in orders, delays or cancellations… ), with the selling activity.
Another problem that a commercial agent can face is scheduling customer visits on their daily agenda. Therefore, they must adapt the route and optimize it based on last minute changes.
It is important to take into account the point of departure of the seller: in most cases, the starting and ending point could be his home, office or companies headquarters. Another variant to consider is the time invested visiting the client, which varies depending on the potential opportunity of the sale.
How to create a good itinerary
Plan the itinerary with a route optimization platform, such as Cigo!Fleet. This platform, connected to a commercial management program, will automatize all the routing and resolution of problems that are presented to the commercial agent on a daily basis.
Advantages of using a route optimizer
A platform like Cigo!Fleet performs the routes based on the preferences of the manager. For example, you can select to optimize the most economical route, the fastest with public transport, the shortest with private transport, or any other factors that will benefit the company by reducing costs.
Taking into account the previous problems identified when dealing with creating routes for sales agents:
- Different starting points, for instance on Mondays they start form the headquarters while on Saturdays from their home.
- Different durations of visits, depending on the potential of selling to that client.
- Schedule of the agents commercial
- Preferences for certain clients to visit them first or at a certain time of the day that worke better for them
The platform will automatically take everything above into consideration and create the best route which also makes the most savings for the company. Not only the regular routes, but also the platform is able to automatically reschedule visits that weren’t finally completed, for example, due to the absence of the client. At the same time, it allows setting frequency for future appointments scheduled.
As another great bonus for managers our platform offers geolocation of the sellers in real-time and the possibility to check if they are correctly following the route and if there has been any incidence during the day.
By being associated with the commercial management program, the seller can automatically send the incidents to the person responsible, saving both time and management resources.
With a platform like CIGO!Fleet there is save on expenses and the possibility to get the most of the time of client visit to lengthen to the maximum the so-called golden minute, that is, the time in which a sale takes place.
