Does Your Business Need Smarter Sales Route Planning?

We all know that type of customer: the ones who immediately call the sales person the second there’s a problem. There’s no way to explain to them that the deliveries are handled by a different team, and that they’d be better off talking to a dispatcher—they want to talk to the person who sold them their order. Depending on the circumstances, this may or may not be reasonable. If you’re a grocery store and you’ve got a shipment of fizzy water coming in, you might expect your sales rep to come by as a matter of course to talk shop and make sure everything is right with the order. Someone who buys a couch and then insists on talking to the original seller when there are delivery questions—well, let’s just say that you wouldn’t expect a seller to come out and visit as a matter of course.

And, of course, for many businesses this isn’t a meaningful distinction. Your drivers and your sellers are one and the same, and they way their routes are organized and the way that they’re set up to communicate with customers has to speak to that fact. 

If you fall into that last category, and even if you fall into one of the others, there’s a good chance you could stand to upgrade your sales route planning. 

What Is Sales Route Planning?

Let’s take a quick step back and define our terms. Sales route planning can refer to either the planning and optimization of routes for sales reps—i.e. for folks who are making customer visits but not necessarily completing deliveries—or for drivers who are also sellers, like you might see in the uniform and linen distribution industry. 

The big difference between these two scenarios is the importance of optimization. If you’re a sales rep calling on your customers, you can save time and money by optimizing. If you’re a driver and a seller, optimization is an absolute must. 

When it comes to planning delivery routes, there’s a well-publicized set of challenges that make efficiency difficult—unpredictable delivery and service times, handling customer time window requests, gaining visibility into total capacity and finding a way to maximize it, etc. 

To a greater or lesser extent, these same challenges plague sales route planning processes—but most solutions don’t specifically offer functionality designed to meet sales routing challenges. 

At the end of the day, if you have sellers visiting customers as a major part of your business, you want to optimize your sales routes with the same care as your delivery routes. That means leveraging the same level of technological sophistication—in the form of AI- and machine learning-powered capabilities designed to tackle complex parameters in minutes. 

When you can make this happen—in other words, when you find the right routing solution for your tech stack—you can get more out of your sales personnel and ultimately service your customers more effectively. 

3 Benefits of Smarter Sales Route Planning

So what happens, exactly, when you upgrade your sales route planning and optimization capabilities? If you’ve chosen the right routing solution, you should see benefits right off the bat:

Reduced costs

Simply put, when you have efficient sales routes, your sales reps can complete more stops per route, and thus service more customers per day. Not only does this save time for everyone out in the field—thus reducing your overall costs—it also reduces the number of miles that your sales reps have to cover. This reduces costs even further in the form of reduced fuel consumption, and even reduced wear and tear on your fleet over time. 

The cost savings that more efficient routes can generate out in the field are significant, but for some businesses the back-office cost savings can be even more game-changing. If you’re in a position where you have route planners spending weeks developing route plans for different sellers or regions, you can cut that time by more than 90% with the right solution. The time and effort savings here can be huge.

Streamlined visibility and coordination between teams

Even if you’re not in a position where shaving miles off your sales route plans is crucial to success, you can still gain some meaningful advantages with smarter route optimization. How? By ensuring that the left hand always knows what the right is doing. 

This is easy to overlook in most instances, but when it comes to ensuring coordination between sales and delivery operations, visibility matters. If your delivery teams are trying to coordinate with sellers to make sure that they (the delivery teams) are reaching the customer sites either before the sellers or at the same time, each team needs insight into the other one’s plan. That doesn’t work if the delivery driver has a defined route while the sales rep is mostly winging it. 

Here, the key is to leverage the same solution for both sets of routes. This way, every stakeholder who needs to can easily use both delivery and sales routes to make sure they’re adding up to a level of service that works for your customers.

Improved customer experience

That last point we made in the section above is the crucial one: improved sales routing leads to improved customer experience. In other words, happier customers and more repeat business. 

How exactly does this shake out? In a nutshell, it comes down to predictability, connectivity, and capacity. 

• Predictability: When you’re planning routes with a solution, rather than by hand, you can estimate ETAs more accurately. This means that sales personnel can give customers time estimates that actually reflect reality, and they can show up on time, every time. This can be huge when it comes to ensuring satisfied customers. 
• Connectivity: Once your sales reps and their activities are integrated (or at least visible) within your last mile ecosystem, communication across and between teams is streamlined. Not only that, but sales reps, delivery teams, managers, and any other stakeholder can track progress along a given route as needed. If you’re trying to coordinate between sales and delivery personnel so that they arrive at a delivery site at the same time—something that some customers may want, at least occasionally—this is a huge boon. 
• Capacity: Like we said above, you’re not necessarily looking to shave off every possible mile and squeeze as many stops out of a sales rep as possible (though there are certainly some cases where this is absolutely crucial). But route optimization gives you visibility into exactly what your sales personnel capacity is, so you can always make promises to your customers that you can actually keep. 

The simple upshot is this: when you’re able to optimize sales routes the same way you optimize delivery routes, your customers are often the primary beneficiaries. When you can benefit your customers at the same moment that you’re optimizing costs, that’s a huge win-win. 

So the only question remaining is this: how can you find the right software to ensure efficient, effective sales routes? For starters, look for an innovative, SaaS and AI-powered solution with a strong track record of helping customers save money and time. And look for something that will slot seamlessly into your existing technology stack. 

There’s more to it than that, but those criteria are a good starting point. If you want to learn more, feel free to reach out to one of our experts today.