Chapter 1: What is route planning?

What is route planning? 

Route planning is much more than simply entering a location into a consumer-grade navigation app to find the fastest path. Sales teams often have long lists of prospects and customers they need to visit, but manually entering them in the optimal order takes far too much time and energy.

Route planning software eliminates these inefficiencies by helping sales ops teams target high-value leads and clients, balance workloads, and generate the most efficient route for each driver. Rather than starting near a rep's home and ending in the same place, route planning focuses on minimizing travel time between visits to maximize selling time and productivity. Prioritizing key prospects and customers compounds these benefits to boost sales opportunities and even increase revenue potential.

Whereas route planning sets the schedule and creates a strategic route, optimization offers reps the unique ability to adjust their schedules on the fly. Whether it's an appointment that ran late, a last-minute cancellation, or backed-up traffic on the freeway, field sales reps know that their days don't always go to plan. Route optimization software can help mitigate delays by enabling your field team to search for nearby clients and add their stops to the day's agenda.

Having the ability to mark when timeslots change and generate a newly optimized route is critical to stay on schedule and on track toward success. Plus, ops teams can track each schedule change and view any additional notes left by the rep. Not only does this allow your team to see as many clients as possible, but the added visibility means it's easy to track performance and make adjustments as needed.