As an Area Manager, your mission is not only to develop sales, but also to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain an effective presence in the field. To achieve these ambitious goals, the sales tour plays a central role.
The design and optimization of your sales tour plan are undeniable assets that will enable you to increase your productivity, and consequently the number of appointments you can make.
In this article, we'll take a deep dive into the art of optimizing sales tour plans, to give you all the keys you need to maximize your efficiency and successfully achieve your objectives.
The sales tour plan is a roadmap that organizes your schedule to maximize the number of appointments, while rationalizing associated costs and travel time.
It covers a defined area and extends over a period that can be as short as a day, a week or a month.
The aim of a sales tour plan is to enable you to find the most optimized route for your tours in the field. And to optimize them, you can use dedicated software solutions, whether CRM or tour management applications. Today, route planning is presented in the form of a list or, ideally, in the form of an interactive map.
The effectiveness of the tour plan often depends on customer segmentation, which helps to align it with your company's ambitions and objectives.
There are several ways you can structure your route plan to cover your entire territory.
The sales area is divided into distinct zones, each approached as a "petal". Each zone is covered in a loop, enabling a series of appointments to be made until you return to the starting point, i.e. the salesperson's business or home.
It's best suited to limited sectorization and lends itself well to monthly planning, since it allows you to "make" one petal per day.
The cloverleaf tour follows the same reasoning as the daisy chain tour, but limits the number of zones to 4.
This model is particularly well-suited to weekly organization, where four days are dedicated to field visits, and one day to the office, for administrative, prospecting and organizational tasks.
The zigzag tour is generally used for tours over a wide area but crossed by a central road, for example when a large number of customers are on either side of a freeway.
The traveling salesman then starts with the meeting farthest from his prospecting base, and follows this up with all the other visits in the direction of his starting point.
Also designed to cover vast territories, the snail tour describes a spiral tour from the starting point, ending with the furthest appointment, in the manner of a snail.
Now that you know the different types of tour, let's look at the criteria for choosing the one best suited to your needs.
To plan your rounds, you need to know the objective of your visit, and therefore the customers or prospects to visit. To do this, your manager can share with you the visit criteria, or in the best of all possible worlds, share with you a filtered view of the sales outlets to be visited.
Generally speaking, the sales tour plan is based on outlets with the greatest sales potential. As sales potential varies greatly from one outlet to another, the frequency of customer meetings requires a specific scoring of the establishments to be met.
Your scoring will be based on several criteria:
For example:
You know who you want to visit and why. Now you'll have to optimize your route if you want to spend more time on a date than in the car.
To achieve this, we advise you to use a software solution designed around route optimization, and not adapted or cobbled together to work with third-party mapping applications. Indeed, solutions such as Google Maps or Excel are not designed to achieve this level of performance and optimization, and won't be able to help you optimize your routes.
Having a map view is even more of an advantage if it's accompanied by intuitive tools, such as the lasso, which makes it easier for you to select your stores.
If you use Sidely :
Being on a sales tour isn't always easy, because unforeseen circumstances can arise at any time.
When you're on the road, you don't always have your computer close at hand. That's why it's essential to work with a solution that can be accessed from your phone and/or tablet, which is so much more practical in these situations!
As an Area Manager, it's important to optimize your travel schedule because, in addition to your mission to develop sales, you must also :
And that's not all: in addition to our sales development and in-store survey missions, we're also committed to enhancing customer satisfaction, and thus building distributor loyalty.
If you still have questions, simply schedule an online demo!
