Why Intelligent Tour Planning Makes Field Sales More Successful
In field sales, every minute spent travelling competes with a potential sales opportunity. Unlike logistics or customer service, where travel time is a calculated part of the business model, unnecessary travel time in sales directly means less time available for customer visits – and therefore potentially lost revenue.
Professional tour planning addresses this challenge by reducing unnecessary travel time and creating more time for customer visits. This additional time can be used either to visit more customers or to spend more time with individual customers. Studies show that companies can save up to 120 person-hours per year through efficient and professional tour planning.
The time gained through more efficient tour planning does not necessarily have to be used for additional visits. It can also be used to spend more time with individual customers and provide more comprehensive support.
How Can Field Sales Visits Be Optimised?
There are various approaches to reducing travel time and creating more time for customer visits. The time gained can be used to increase visit frequency or to allow more time for individual customer appointments. Depending on the specific requirements and circumstances, the best approach is often a combination of strategic and operational tour planning.
What Is Strategic Tour Planning?
Strategic tour planning primarily focuses on defining sales territories and assigning customers to field sales employees. Calculating a so-called master tour plan – taking visit frequency, visit duration and available employee capacity into account – provides valuable insights into how much time is actually available for customer visits. This makes it possible to identify whether available capacity could be used for additional visits or whether more time could be allocated to individual customer appointments.
In this context, optimised tour sequences can be created for periods of up to one year and used as suggested visit schedules for field sales employees. If these tour plans are provided by sales management or the inside sales team, this is also referred to as centralised tour planning.
There is a close connection between tour planning and territory planning: only when territories are structured efficiently can tour planning reach its full potential. Find out more about how to analyse and optimise sales territories and which common mistakes to avoid in our article Common Mistakes in Field Sales Territory Planning.
Operational Tour Planning: Responding Flexibly to Change
If responsibility for coordinating the tours lies with the field sales employees themselves, this is referred to as decentralised planning. With the support of suitable solutions and access to sales-relevant data – such as planned visits, sales potential and customer categories – employees can independently plan their tours within their territories.
If short-notice appointment cancellations or traffic disruptions can also be taken into account, this is referred to as operational tour planning. This form of planning is particularly flexible and responds directly to day-to-day changes – a key advantage in dynamic sales environments.
Our article How Utilized Is Your Field Sales Team – Really? shows how data-based analysis of field sales capacity utilisation can help create the right foundation for tour planning.
easymap Tour Planning: Strategic Optimisation for Your Field Sales Team
With the easymap tour planning module, we support you in specifically optimising your strategic tour planning. The extension provides the tools you need to increase the efficiency of your field sales team based on data – from territory analysis and master tour planning to capacity utilisation calculations.
In addition, our market data provides a solid basis for evaluating customer potential and setting the right visit priorities. Practical examples of how easymap can be used can be found in our overview of applications with easymap.
Would You Like to Optimise Your Field Sales Tour Planning?
Every company has different requirements when it comes to tour planning. Whether you want to reduce travel time, increase visit frequency, create more time for individual customer visits or organise your sales territories more efficiently – we support you with our software, personal consulting and training or joint project support.
Would you like to learn more? Feel free to schedule an online presentation or contact our consulting team by email at consulting@infas360.de or by phone at +49 228 9591491. We will show you how to make your tour planning more efficient with easymap.
This post is also available in: DE
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