Mastering Route Optimization: The Ultimate Playbook for High-Impact Field Execution

Introduction

Route Optimization is the process of creating optimized routes that maximize market coverage and minimize field sales reps’ operations cost. It creates efficient routes for sales reps, decreasing their travel distance and time and increasing  their store visits with more face time at each store. With it, sales reps can have less time on the road and more time at stores alongside visiting each store at their optimal time and day. Hence, route optimization turns every store visit into a productive visit, helping sales reps visit stores at the right time and generate consistent sales. Sufficient face time also strengthens bonds with customers, building a positive image for the brand which is crucial in upscaling the business. 

Many brands lag in route optimization due to their manual process creating inefficient, error-prone routes with misallocation of reps. This leads to their business downfall with a surge in field sales operational cost and poor market coverage.

If this feels like you, then read this blog till the end. It is packed with all the necessary insights, best practices and valuable information to help you create optimized routes, improve  market coverage, and increase productivity of your sales reps.

What are the Challenges of Manual Route Planning?

Manual route planning is a tedious process that involves evaluation of multiple factors- territory cutting, looking into available sales reps and assigning suitable territory. It also includes other factors like number of stores and segmenting them, visit frequency for the stores, ideal visit time and day, proximity between the assigned stores and sleep outs. These factors could even expand further for some brands. Even with meticulously evaluating these factors and putting in hours of effort, sales managers end up creating routes that are highly error-prone and inefficient. This is quite common and expected because they create and manage routes in excel sheets due to which they lose track of  crucial data. 

Their strategies are based on manually marking territories and defining routes based on own knowledge about the roads. This leads to missed opportunities to identify more  efficient and shortest routes to cover stores. Manual route planning process further leads to miscalculation of assigned number of sales reps leading to risk of over staffing or understaffing.

For instance, if 190 sales reps are sufficient for a region’s market coverage, the manager may assign 230 sales reps. Assigning a huge number of reps, however, doesn’t guarantee  sales as they may not visit in optimal day and time. So, the huge cost that goes into field operation becomes futile  leading to business downfall. 

Many businesses don’t have visibility into how huge the negative impact of manual route optimization is and so they are unaware of the real reason for their business falling behind. If you are stuck with manual and inefficient route planning , you must look into digital route optimization software. It creates optimized routes, improving market coverage in a cost-effective way making more brands adopt it.

How Does Route Optimization Software Work?

The route optimization software utilizes its advanced route optimization engine to evaluate all the provided parameters and present optimized routes. With all the provided parameters, be it- segmentation of store, available sales reps, regular and cyclic visits, time duration at each store, operational day of stores and geo-location, it evaluates and offers efficient routes that enable maximum market coverage seamlessly.  

However, the potential of the software isn’t limited to creating optimized routes. 

It also extends further by offering the exact number of sales reps required and optimal day and time for them to visit stores by evaluating data such as customer location, required frequency and their availability. So, the software not only simplifies the route creation process but also greatly aids managers in making decisions for the right day and time for store visits and effective resource allocation.

Features of Route Optimization Software

The performance of route optimization software depends on its features. To help you choose the most effective solution for your business, we’ve compiled a list of key features to look for in high-performing software.

Territory Planning 

The ideal route optimization software must have the potential from efficient territory cutting and store segmentation to allocating reps to their suitable territory. Needless to say, it must create optimized routes that enable efficient market coverage.  

Entry of Wide Range of Parameters

The optimization of routes depends on the parameters provided. Hence, the software should enable entering and evaluating diverse parameters such as 

• Visit frequency

• Working hours and off-day 

• GPS location

• Customer profiling data

• Store segmentation

• Time to be spent at each store

• Number of stops in a day and sleep out 

• Store opening and closing hours

It should also be flexible enough to generate both regular and cyclical visit plans. These inputs will help in generating highly optimized routes with ideal day and time that turns every store visit into a productive visit. 

Ad-hoc Visits

With ad-hoc visits being time-sensitive, the software must have the capability to swiftly come up with routes that perfectly aligns with the visit strategy. Imagine launching a seasonal summer campaign for a new beverage. To drive sales from the very start of summer, promotions must begin before the season starts. Early marketing builds awareness and demand, ensuring strong sales from the very beginning of summer. So, in such cases, the effectiveness of campaigns is highly time-bound. Hence, the software must also rapidly adapt to the ad-hoc capabilities by swiftly modifying the existing routes based on the class of stores that have been chosen for the campaign.       

Defining Constraints

The functionality of defining constraints improves the process of route optimization further. The possibility to set outlets per sales rep, maximum stops and distance for a day, maximum overtime and sleep-out rules will enable fine-tuning the routes. This also helps in allocating achievable workload to sales reps. It is highly beneficial to go with the software that converts parameters into constraints.  

Perencanaan Rute Dinamis

Software with dynamic route capabilities will equip the sales reps with real-time data on traffic, weather conditions that helps in averting roadblocks ensuring timely field activities without any delays.   

Adoptable to Different Stakeholders 

The software should be adoptable to multiple stakeholders in the supply chain- be it sales reps, distributors and brand’s delivery to distributors thereby ensuring seamless primary and secondary sales. A distributor can make timely delivery only if the stock reaches him on time from the brand. Hence, route optimization software holds immense importance in primary sales as well as it helps in creating optimized routes with the available number of delivery vehicles ensuring timely delivery.  The software also creates optimized routes for distributors. If the distributors are equipped with a handy digital device, they can view the optimized routes paving the way for on-time delivery.

Effective Store Segmentation and Geo-location Capturing

The effective segmentation of stores is vital in defining the visit frequency of stores based on which routes are created. However, segmentation can be done effectively only if the data captured during store profiling is accurate and also offers sufficient insights to understand the store’s potential. 

Hence, it is ideal to offer sales reps with digital solutions for store profiling that are equipped with advanced technologies like de-duplication and profiling engine. Since route optimization is all about creating efficient routes between the stores, a digital solution is imperative to have accurate geo-location of the store with its exact latitude and longitude details at their disposal.   

How do Sales Managers Benefit from Route Optimization Software?

Route Optimization software is a huge sigh of relief to sales managers.The software eliminates the need for manual intervention, evaluates all the parameters and creates highly optimized and efficient routes. Thus, the software takes care of the complex and error-prone process in route planning and also impresses with its output by offering highly optimized routes that turn sales reps’ everyday field visits into productive visits. The only area that managers must focus on is setting the right and required parameters. Therefore, managers gain maximum benefit with minimal effort by incorporating route optimization software.

However, you cannot reap the benefits of the route optimization software if it is not executed properly. It means that if your reps don’t follow the routes suggested by the software, you cannot benefit from it. So, having visibility into the field activities of sales reps is crucial. This can be done using an effective sales force automation software that gives you visibility into sales reps’ routes and their store activities.

Industry-Specific Use Cases of Route Optimization

FMCG and Consumer Goods Industries  

Route Optimization software is a perfect suit for industries like FMCG and consumer goods, as the sales managers have to create routes for thousands of stores and the sales reps numbers are also quite high when compared with other industries. Here are the use cases of this software across these two industries.  

Right Allocation of Reps

Based on the visit strategy for the sales reps, the software could offer the right number of reps that are required. This helps in avoiding over allocation of sales reps and prevents unwanted costs.   

Optimal Visit Day and Time

The software removes all the complexity in route planning by offering optimized routes, optimal visit day and time to visit stores. This will leave a significant advantage in sales as reps can do timely reporting of stocks and take orders that leads to timely replenishment and drive sales.  

Efficient Territory Cutting

Efficient territory cutting lays the foundation in creating effective optimized routes for the sales reps. This can be done effortlessly by having route optimization software in place. 

Elevates Van Sales

Since timely delivery of perishable goods is crucial, route optimization is highly beneficial as it creates efficient routes for the available vehicles that result in swift delivery. 

Other Industries

In the FMCG industry, the demand for stocks is usually constant which makes the route optimization software ideal for this industry. For other industries like Building Materials and Consumer durables industry, there are solutions like AI-driven visit planning that utilizes sales data and other data such as visit frequency and sales pattern and suggests optimized routes to potential and critical stores. 

Manual Route Optimization vs Route Optimization Software

Can Google Maps do Route Optimization? 

Google Maps has its own limitations in adding the number of stops in a route. Most importantly, it does not support adding all the parameters without which an optimized route cannot be created. Also, there are no any functionalities to do territory cutting and creating routes for multiple numbers of sales reps at a time.

Wrapping Up: 

Route Optimization software is of huge advantage to the sales manager by not just eliminating the load of creating routes manually to hundreds of sales reps but also offering outstanding output that increases market coverage at a minimal cost. However, its benefits don’t end here. It brings out the best performance from the sales reps by offering them sufficient face time with the customers, creating an opportunity for them to perform strategic business communication to strengthen bonds and gain better customer understanding. These are crucial in elevating sales and building products and strategies that could win in the market. Hence, route optimization can lay the strong foundation for your route-to-market strategy. BeatRoute is a leading player in developing highly advanced and effective route optimization software. 

With serving over 200+ enterprise brands, it empowers brands with its sales enablement platform. Route optimization is a highly visual concept, and visual learning plays a crucial role in understanding it clearly. That’s why we recommend booking a live demo with BeatRoute to understand the full potential of the route optimization software.