GPS technology is often only thought about for use in logistics deliveries and for large fleets of vehicles. It is however also used successfully in sales. If you have sales personnel and are not using GPS tracking, you need to find out what you are missing out on.
1. What do you do on the road?
One of the benefits of GPS tracking is that it monitors driving behaviour. This is so whether you are in an HGV, van or car. So by using GPS systems to feedback driving behaviour to your sales team to help them drive more efficiently will save you money in fuel expenses. Wait a minute, you might be thinking that you want your sales team to drive quickly between customer meetings to pack more of them in during the day? Well if this is the case, maybe you need to understand how effective your sales team is, if meetings are over running, prequalification has not determined how serious and therefore punctual the customer is, or how well your sales team has planned for the meeting and even the day’s journeys? GPS gives you data that will enable you to better ask questions so business and individual sales performance is raised.
2. What’s the best route?
Time equals money and this is particularly true in the sales industry. So do you really have a handle on how much time your sales team spends on the road compared to the time spent at a customer site or office? GPS will give you times for journeys, engine idling, start/stop data and using geofences will more accurately also tell you how much time was spent in a particular location. You maybe surprised to learn:
- How many genuine customer visits were made in a day, week or month
- The reasons for shorter than expected, missed or cancelled appointments
- Time spent being caught in traffic
- Inefficient or uneffective journey planning decisions
- Unscheduled or unexpected appointments and stops
Meeting sales quotas based on the number of customer visits do not tell the entire story. There is always the possibility of working more effectively. Remember too this isn’t all about finger pointing. Rather it gives you the opportunity to support your sales team. After all the whole point is to enable your organisation to make more sales.
3. Something for the weekend
Being responsible is all part of the sale persons job. This includes taking responsibility for themselves, their car and looking after company property. Journey reports include those completed at weekends and outside working hours. If your comapny is picking up the tab for insurance claims, mileage expenses and more frequent servicing bills due to irresponsible driving or use of company property outside working hours, then GPS will give you information helping you to manage this situation as you see fit. Plus as a driver, if you know GPS devices are fitted, then psychologically your behaviour will change…at least to start with, as you know you might be being tracked.
4. Dedicated to administration
The GPS system is dedicated to producing timesheet reports and journey data automatically. This means your sales people do not have to manually record and remember trips and visits, or spend a few hours each week recording their timesheet information. They can just get on with the job of selling.
5. Focus on winning
Having software that allows a simple comparison of client trips, journeys made, mileage completed, time spent and all in a format that allows a comparison with actual sales achieved, makes it easier for you to understand how much effort is going into sales trips per customer in order to get a sale. With this type of information at your fingertips you can start to understand the most productive journeys, as well as the least productive ones, then put an action plan in place to improve the situation.
GPS tracking is not all just about seeing an HGV vehicle on a map. It has wider business implications and remember that other businesses are using GPS for sales purposes, so if you’re not, look at what you’re missing.