Chapter 3: How can route optimization benefit your field based team?

Conquering sales routing - The ultimate guide

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Today's sales and service teams are under immense pressure to boost revenue and minimize costs while using the same resources as before. The result? They're stuck using manual route planning processes and consumer-grade apps that lead to:

  • Preventable errors in data entry, scheduling, and planning.
  • Limitations in plotting multiple stops.
  • Unequal distribution of workloads across reps.
  • Scheduling mishaps and confusion that result in missed opportunities.

Route optimization software mitigates these challenges by centralizing all of your customer and sales data in one location to create efficient, multi-stop routes for all your reps. With this unified solution, your organization can:

Automate route planning

Route optimization software connects with your current CRM and existing data sources to centralize customer and sales information on a single platform. From there, it’s easy to load the data sets you need and automatically generate the most efficient route plan.

Prioritize accounts to drive revenue

Visualization tools provide a comprehensive view of plotted territories with custom attribute overlays to highlight high-value areas. This allows you to prioritize specific accounts that have a high sales potential for each route.

Improve resource management

Data visualizations and user-friendly planning tools allow team leaders to plan and balance routes and workloads. That way, all reps get equal opportunities and nobody is overloaded with stops.

Create more efficient routes

Route planning with an optimization solution allows you to add multiple stops for various customers and prospects. Then, algorithms automatically find the most efficient route between all the points to increase selling time.

Minimize travel time and costs

With faster, more efficient driving routes, reps can minimize their travel time and associated expenses. Not only does that mean more time with customers, but it also means reduced costs for things like fuel and maintenance.

Optimize routes on the go

Perhaps most notably, route optimization software allows your reps to account for delays and daily disruptions while they’re on the move. If an appointment slot opens up unexpectedly, they just need to add a new customer and the software automatically finds an optimized route.