Do you have field representatives in sales, consulting or service in your enterprise? Do you want to deploy route-planning software to improve your field-sales performance? A 25% efficiency boost is possible — but to reap the fruits, you have to deploy successfully. No matter how good the software is, during deployment it matters more what you do right (or wrong). So follow these 12 tips we have learned from over 100 successful enterprise rollouts of the route-planning software portatour® every year.
- The decision-makers need to pull in the same direction. CEO, sales-management and IT-management must stand firmly behind the route-planning project and communicate positively to the sales representatives. Educate them until everyone is on the same page! Communicate these arguments to the decision makers.
- Hold your horses! Do you wish you had rolled out route optimization for all employees yesterday? Even under time pressure, it is important to start with a controlled pilot project with carefully selected sales representatives as pilot users. Learn the ropes, set up everything correctly, and spare yourself the criticism of the whole team if something doesn’t work as expected on the first try. Once pilot users are firmly in the saddle, the good news will spread and the whole team will want to join the ride.
- Start with 5 to 10 pilot users. Fewer than 5? If one falls ill, goes on vacation, or quits, you won’t be able to gather reliable results. More than 10? You will feel like you are herding cats.
- Start with the best. Suitable pilot users are technology-savvy, open-minded performers who want to improve themselves. Unsuitable people are those who want to work “as always” or shun technology. No matter how good the software is, the wrong pilots ensure that your project never takes off, the right ones make it fly.
- Do your homework in the CRM. The worse the quality of the addresses in your CRM, the more dead “zombie” clients are in your CRM, the worse your route-optimization will be. If garbage from the CRM goes into route-planning, garbage routes come out. Remove the garbage from your CRM. For help, follow these instructions for the preparation of your data.
- Set realistic territories and goals. Are the territories of the reps rightly sized? Do reps have too many or too few customers? Have you defined which customer should be visited how often, for example based on an ABC categorization? If this is not settled yet, work on your strategic sales and territory planning.
- Technology has to work before the sales reps go to work. Before you start: configure, test, and take care of the data-quality! We are happy to help by means of a Setup Workshop. The pilot users should spend their time visiting more customers while driving fewer miles. They should not find bugs that could have been found previously. To make the technology work, you need an IT professional on the team; don’t settle for an intern.
- Train the first pilots. “Learning by doing” is good, but “flying blind” is not recommended. Hold a training session on the first day of the pilot project. Train pilot users, IT-support, and the sales director. Hire a pro to conduct the training, knowing how to adapt and deploy the new software for your individual situation. To this end, we offer a User Training Session. In this way, you build a “training-pyramid”: the first users will subsequently train others.
- Questions and criticism are good – as long as you answer. The field representatives will ask questions and even criticize the software and the new process. Good! They are showing interest. Establish a single point of contact, e.g. IT support, project manager, or sales manager. Make sure to answer questions promptly and send the reply to all pilot users – this way everyone can learn. Having an in-house expert for route-planning makes you also independent from external support.
- Treat the pilot like production. When your field staff is using the route-planning software in a pilot project, they generate real data: appointments, call reports and customer data. This is valuable data. Ensure that it does not end up in the trash but is fed into existing systems.
- Boldly go where no rep has gone before. The proverb goes: “Insanity is defined by driving the same routes over and over again and expecting different results”. This is the moment to throw the “established routes” overboard. Don’t relent to a rep who wants to “always visit my best beloved customer on every Wednesday (for a coffee-break)”. Treat the pilot project as controlled experiment: let the route-optimizer calculate optimized routes and let the sales reps drive them. Stop them from driving like they have always driven; break habits now. This is the only way to visit up to 25% more customers.
- Measure and improve continually, not at the end. Do not wait until the end of the pilot phase to gather information – this can turn into a bitter ending. Do not use a questionnaire at the end, either. Rather, cultivate the pilot project continuously: read the portatour® Reports daily, check the suggested route-plans, ask the pilot users about their experience in a Q&A Session. In this way, you move roadblocks out of the way and successes are immediately communicated to everyone.
We wish you much success. Any questions? The team of experts from the portatour® route-planner is here to assist: www.portatour.com