Without Customer Data, complementing the process of Route Optimization and beat planning, your field team will
1. End up Meeting fewer customers
2. End up Meeting wrong customers
3. End up having no visibility of sales reps needed
4. Spend more time on the road traveling
With Customer Data, included in beat planning will:
1. Help you Allocate the right capacity of resources.
2. Help be operationally efficient, you want to save on travel time and have more facetime with customers.
Detailed and accurate customer data
Detailed and accurate customer data should be included in Beat Planning, to get optimized routes from the route planning software.
You need to know your customers well before planning visit routes. Know who is suitable for you. You don't want a customer on your list who is not giving you business anymore, who is not suitable for your product being part of the beat plan. You would need to know their potential because the potential is what defines whether you want to visit them every week or every other week.
Lastly, you want to know where they are exactly because that is when you will be able to optimize the travel time with them.
Transcribe
Hello Everyone, I have a Hack to share with you today - that is to implement an intelligent beat plan if you want to increase sales in any territory team. We are calling it a hack which it is not,. It's just a basic that needs to be done. So if you run an FMCG sales operation or a channel-led sales operations, you need to make repeat visits to your customers or partners and you would have thought about implementing a beat plan. Here are 2/3 metrics to get it right. First 2 points - why should we be doing it? - Simple
1. Because you want to allocate the right capacity of resources.
2. Because you want to be operationally efficient, you want to save on travel time and have more facetime with customers.
The 3 ways about how to do it?
1. Use profiling - customer profiling to be intelligent about this beat plan.
a. Know your customers. Know who is suitable for you. You don't want a customer on your list who is not giving you business anymore, who is not suitable for your product being part of the beat plan.
b. Know their potential, because the potential is what defines whether you want to visit them every week or every other week.
c. The last point, you want to know where they are exactly because that is when you will be able to optimize the travel time with them.
2. Use a Tool - Use a tool to scientifically divide a territory into routes and define a journey plan who should be visited on Monday, who should be visited on Tuesday and so on and so forth. Trust me that would give you 20% more returns.
3. Lastly, the simple point is that once you have done this, then you have to make sure your sales team is actually following that beat plan, they are adhering to that beat plan.
So it's all common wisdom, but the reason that I bring it up is because most of these beat plans don’t get followed. The sales team tends to not follow them because this is not done in the right sequence. If you follow the right sequence you are likely to get there.
That’s our hack for today, for increasing sales from any territory team. There is a poll in the link. Take that 2 question poll to know where you are in this process. I’d love to hear from you. Until then, Bye.
