How Efficient Sales Routes Increase Revenue & Cost-effectiveness
A lot rides on the quality of your sales route, from cost to company and revenue opportunity to conversion rate and employee wellbeing — even environmental impact.
Shrinking the winding road between your sales reps and their prospects promises to massively increase profitability, reducing costs while improving sales performance.
Unleash the full potential of your field sales teams with this handy guide through the challenges and benefits of streamlined route-planning.
Challenges in Sales Route Planning
Mapping out the optimal journey for your field sales reps is no easy task.
From customer cancellations to traffic dynamics and sheer geographic distribution, sales routes must balance an array of factors to calculate the least costly sequence of visits with the highest likelihood of conversion.
Some crucial considerations include:
Geographical Complexity:
Prospects are often dispersed across a large sales territory, requiring long, circuitous commutes between scattered locations.
Moreover changing road conditions — including municipal maintenance, breakdowns and rush-hours, and disruptive weather — can snag field reps in unforeseen delays, obliging teams to reroute throughout the day.
Operational Constraints
Like every other team in a business, a sales team evaluates its operational efficacy against strict time and budgetary allocations.
Slow or costly routes waste company resources, reducing visit counts and revenue, while eating away at your bottom line.
Technological Limitations
Field sales is a dynamic game. Sudden opportunities or obstacles arise throughout the day, making improvised decision-making a necessary skill.
Without integrated real-time data from sales management software to guide momentary tactical pivots — such as when reprioritising visits and recalculating routes — field reps find themselves hamstrung and flailing.
Cost Management
Suboptimal travel plans cause fuel, maintenance and administrative costs to stack, draining resources from other divisions of the company. This makes route planning all the more critical.
Environmental and Regulatory Factors
Frequent, wasteful sales trips produce needless carbon emissions, contributing to the acceleration of global warming and climate crisis.
This also jeopardises efforts at corporate-environmental sustainability, risking incurring non-compliance penalties from regulators.
Human Factors
Excessive driving impinges on employee wellbeing, as sales reps spend large portions of the workday cramped into confined artificial spaces with minimal movement or social interaction.
While equipping reps with the skills to stay mobile, connected and energised throughout the day is vital, more efficient sales routes serve to alleviate the physical and emotional costs of long commutes at source.
The Importance of Leveraging Sales Routes
Businesses which master sales route planning accrue major benefits on both sides of the cost-revenue equation, driving both efficiency and sales success.
Cost Efficiency
Optimal routes use smart territory design to reduce wasted time and money spent idling in traffic, missing visits or keeping customers waiting.
Visiting the maximum number of high-priority clients in the minimum amount of time means every pound invested goes that much further.
Increased Sales Productivity
When sales reps make more visits, feeling energised and confident, they sell with greater enthusiasm, focus and empathy.
Empower your sales reps to achieve by automating away the tedium of route planning, so reps can focus on meeting more prospects and leaving each one delighted.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Prospects feel harried by tired, bedraggled salespeople. But efficient routes keep arduous commutes to a minimum, so reps arrive at visits feeling centred, prepared and ready to deliver.
Competitive Advantage
Onboarding sales software solutions remain novel in the sector, giving early adopters a head start on growing their market share for fast-tracked customer loyalty.
Sustainability
It’s rare to synchronise business objectives with sustainability targets, but efficient sales routes vastly reduce environmental impacts.
Clamp down on pollution and overheads, while eliminating the risk of non-compliance penalties from regulators, with smart route planning that drives tangible success.
Revenue Growth
Strategic tech-enabled route planning equips sales teams to make more visits, impress more prospects and drive higher conversions.
Optimise Your Sales Routes with Geo Rep
Never take a wrong turn again — with Geo Rep, the best field sales app on the market.
While most apps for sales reps specialise in single-purpose functionality, Geo Rep’s all-in-one field management software does it all: from sales tracking to customer data, purchase order logging — and, of course, route planning.
Book a demo
Experience the convenience of rapid route planning for your sales team with the best field sales software on offer — selling better and faster for a fraction of the cost.
Choose the streamlined solution. Book your demo today.