Are you a field rep? How much of your precious time are you at the customer and how much do you spend driving your car? We bet that many field reps, sales-reps, and service technicians out there are spending more time in the car than at the customer.
portatour® – the personal route planner for field reps – gives you more time at the customer and less miles to drive. It does this by planning optimized routes. You can plan schedules at home and update them on the road. Unforeseen appointments happen and not updating your plans will let you miss customers and waste time. Read on to learn how life as a sales rep can be with portatour®, when pressing a button provides you with a plan that lets you get the most out of each day.
Many companies with field reps are still planning routes ahead for weeks or months ahead. This is known as “a fixed route”. Without questioning: any planning is better than no plan at all, but especially in outside sales, service, and consulting your fixed route plan can turn into a roadblock when it hits reality.
How many of the following real-life situations happen to you?
- One of your big-revenue key accounts calls and complains about an issue. By all means: you want to squeeze in a meeting with this customer today. You are making an appointment, independent of what your plan tells you to do today. A fixed route is fixed and you cannot adapt it. What happens to the customers you are skipping now? Will you try to squeeze them in tomorrow, knowing that it is going to be tight? Or will you visit them in a month, when they are scheduled for the next regular visit?
- You are calling in sick or you need to take a day off for an emergency in your family. When will you visit the customers you originally planned to visit that day?
- A meeting takes longer than expected – the promising lead is hooked on your new product line and wants to know all the details. But what happens with the other customers, who can’t be visited in the remaining time today?
- A meeting is cancelled on short notice – your contact is not available. You suddenly win an extra hour time. But which customers are on your way and who should be called instead?
- You are stuck in traffic and lose time. Time which you planned to spend at customers. How do you react?
- Your customers are constantly changing. You also keep getting new quality leads. Old customers go out of business and are removed. On each such occasion, do you rethink and optimize all your fixed weekly and monthly routes, knowing it takes ages of planning to do so?
- Someone else is planning for you, and you can’t possibly keep this person in the loop about all the above ad-hoc decisions you have to make every day to do your job.
In all these situations you hit a barrier when you are still clinging to fixed routes – while you will gain a lot by switching to the personal mobile and dynamic multiple stops route-planner portatour®.
- Planning with portatour® is done by you – the rep out in the field, personally. Not centralized. You do not have to wait for inside sales or central planning to catch up. Of course the sales director sets the strategy and priorities, but the day-to-day tactical decisions are done by the rep on the road.
- You have portatour® available 24/7 at your fingertips: on your smartphone, tablet or notebook.
- You press a button in portatour® you instantly get an optimized route for the current situation. This way, when shenanigans such as traffic jams or squeezed in customers threaten to disrupt your planning, you can update your plan in real time. You will know where you should drive next to make the most of the remainder of the day.
- The portatour® automated planning system holistically cares for your current overall situation: Where are you currently? Are there fixed appointments you must meet? Which customers are due to be called based on their call interval? When are their business hours? How long is your workday?
Many corporations and individuals are stuck with fixed route planning and are asking for ways to make the field force more effective. We, the portatour®-team, have been listening when you were asking for a better way to plan routes. We took up the challenge and provided a solution. The mobile, dynamic route-planning system portatour® is our answer. We built it for reps who want to work a more effective way. It is used by many corporations. Those who switch never look back.