Sales time management to optimize your time allocations to revenue-generating activities is critical to your company’s sales and profit performance.
For field reps, a lot of time is spent on the road meeting with prospects and clients. Here are a few sales time management tips specific to sales trips!
Use Advanced Technology for Scheduling and Routing
Scheduling and routing involve careful coordination of sales meetings to maximize efficient drive time from one destination to the next. Without an emphasis on this strategy, a rep might find themselves driving back and forth across a territory or city unnecessarily.
Advanced technology tools simplify things by aiding in routing optimization when you load contacts. Salesgenie, for instance, has mobile app features that allow you to plot prospects and customers together on a map for optimized scheduling and routing. The app supports route planning for traveling from one meeting to the next.
Avoid Wasted Stops
The movie The Founder (starring Michael Keaton) tells the story of Ray Kroc, the man who turned a fast food concept he saw in the 1950s into the world’s most recognized fast food chain, McDonald’s. Prior to his discovery, the film depicts the struggles Kroc had traveling cross country to pitch milkshake machines to restaurant operators.
Imagine what an innovator like Ray Kroc could have done with technology that enables you to precisely match prospects to top customers in your database. Not only that, but you can easily search, sort, or suppress contacts while on the road, eliminating wasted meetings and trips back to the office. You can fill gaps created by cancellations by identifying other contacts near your current location. Unlike Ray Kroc, you can better gauge the likelihood of a “yes” or a “no” before you drive toward a meeting.
Travel to Zones
“Zoning” is a common method used by top sales organizations to optimize efficiency and targeting by visiting prospects and customers in a narrow geographic region each day. In addition to restricting the scope of your driving range on a daily basis, this strategy helps you identify the particular needs, problems, and interests of contacts in that geographic area. This targeting benefit is especially applicable if you sell solutions with variable uses and benefits affected by climate and seasonality.
Conclusions
Much of your ability to manage time effectively on sales trips comes down to the use of technology and tools that allow for efficient targeting, scheduling, and routing. Top providers use tools available to achieve efficiency, You should do the same to keep up or stay ahead!
Salesgenie provides affordable access to a large database of prospects that allow for precise targeting, as well as tech tools that help with scheduling and routing optimization. Test these tools for yourself risk-free; start your free trial!
