Sales management is a challenging task – especially for sales managers who have large teams of on-field sales executives to handle. However, with proper real-time tracking of field executives, the efficiency of sales executives’ management can go up in a short time.
Effective real-time tracking of on-field sales executives helps improve operational efficiency, reduce expenses and downtime, and improve customers’ experience. There are different mapping software available in the market that can enable you to live-track your on-field resources and streamline your operations.
If you are a sales manager looking for reasons to integrate real-time tracking into your organization, this post will walk you through the benefits of real-time tracking. So, let’s start.
Benefits of Real-Time Tracking of Field Executives
Optimized Operations
Implementing a real-time tracking system to track your on-field resources’ activities helps you manage territories and plan routes more efficiently. They will be able to view the real-time traffic conditions, sales territories, movements of sales reps and decide on the routes they want reps to travel on.
You can also decide on the actions you want your sales reps to take as per their progress in a day. This can help you get the most productive engagement with as many prospects and customers as possible in different territories.
For instance, a sales rep is on the field while you have had a conversation with a lead that has very high chances of converting into a customer. You can simply geo-locate the sales rep in the territory and add a stop on their existing route to cover the new lead if feasible.
Reduced Operational Expenses
Utilizing a live-tracking tool to track your on-field executives helps enable a sales manager to monitor on-field activities. They can make route and territory adjustments available on the fly and you can create the most optimized routes to reach customers. With optimized routes, you can also save travel expenses, overtime, and fleet maintenance. You can also obtain analytics from the online field mapping tool to save time and resources.
Easy Assessment of Real-Time Progress
When you have complete visibility of your on-field resources’ geolocations, activities, and tasks at your fingertips, you can evaluate daily sales easily. By keeping track of the daily progress, you can assess sales progress better and more efficiently and decide on future strategies accordingly.
Increased Number of New Customers
With real-time tracking of sales resources, you can get help increase conversions. With advanced route planning and tracking, you can also stay abreast of the customers’ and leads’ statuses. You can arrange your appointments, track the progress, and take decisions according to the directions in which the meetings or demos go.
For example, if you notice that your sales rep is taking more time in a meeting with one of the prospects, you can assume that closing the deal is highly probable. You can guide your sales rep to take further actions to ensure the success of the deal.
Let’s say the prospect wants a discount that you can afford to provide; you can instruct the sales rep to accept the demand. This way, you can get new prospects turned into customers more and faster with instant decision-making as per situations.
Strengthening of Customer Relations
Besides gaining new customers, maintaining and strengthening relations with your previous customers also becomes easier. When you have all your current customers’ data and their locations, preferences, and more details, you can decide your action plan.
You can also allocate and reallocate your prospects to your different sales reps in real-time as per different situations. Let’s take an example to understand this.
Let’s say your sales rep fails to reach your current customer at a specified time for a meeting due to a breakdown of the vehicle, sickness, or any other reason. What would you do? You would rely on your sales rep to either call or email you and inform them about their situation. Or would you rely on the live-tracking of that sales rep to give you an instant update of their location?
If you can live-track that sales rep, you can get two benefits. The first is that you can redirect that sales rep to a nearby lead or prospect (if any) in the region. The second is that you can call that sales rep back and divert any other sales rep in a nearby territory to cover the customer there too.
This won’t only save your day but also help you serve your customers the day you promised. This will help strengthen your relationships with your existing customers in the long run.
Boost in Efficiency
With tracking of field executives in the proper manner, you can get help to increase your sales team’s overall efficiency by getting the right sales rep at the right time to do the right task. Sometimes, it happens that your sales rep may get stuck in a traffic jam, meet with an accident, or land in some other unwelcome situation.
At these times, if you can keep track of their movements, you can figure out the alternative routes or rescue them in cases of emergencies. This can help increase the efficiency of your sales team. You can also hold your sales team accountable for their actions and cross-verify them to eliminate gaps and streamline your operations.
Right Calculation of Reimbursements
Calculation of reimbursements can be a complex task for almost all organizations. There are always chances of conflicts and clashes between the claimed reimbursements and paid reimbursements. Companies often assign their sales reps a vehicle or pay the fuel and other travel-related expenses every month.
To avoid any confusion or conflicts, you can live-track your resources‘ daily movements and calculate the fuel expenses as per the distance they cover. You can also find out if they are using the assigned routes to cover customers and prospects. If they are wandering off their assigned territories or using the vehicle you assigned to them for other personal uses, you can track it all. Based on it, you can take the required actions like asking them the reason for deviation from their assigned routes and instructing them strictly not to repeat it.
Proper Analysis of Sales Executives’ Performance
With tracking of employees, you can get better visibility and assess their daily or monthly performance better. You can track their daily progress, the number of deals they close versus the target you assigned to them and their individual sales figures.
All this data can help you get the right picture of your individual sales reps’ performance and evaluate their performance rightly. Accordingly, you can decide on the bonuses, incentives, and annual increments you can give to them according to their performance.
Helps Build a Roadmap for Future
Your present actions decide your future. Yes, it holds true for on-field sales performance tracking as well. If you track your sales field executives’ daily progress, you can get an idea of your plan. You can find out high-performance areas and divert your efforts and reps more towards them. On the other hand, if you find that a few of your territories are not giving you as good returns as you expected, you can reduce the efforts and resources assigned for them.
You can also predict the future sales of some promising territories based on daily sales over a period of time. With those estimates and predictions, you can build a roadmap to align your future actions with the requirements of different territories.
Integrate Mappyfield 365 – Your Best Partner in Live-Tracking
Sales tracking is crucial as it helps you get a real-time picture of your daily sales progress and performance and evaluate and plan your future actions.
If you are also looking to track your sales executives and analyze their performance on the go, Mappyfield 365 can help you out. You can enhance the efficiency of your field service in Dynamics 365 with various next-gen features Mappyfield provides.
This feature-rich plugin has Dynamics 365 field mapping and management of territories, heat map visualization, check-ins/check-outs, live tracking, auto-scheduling, advance search, and more. These all features together make sure that you not only succeed in tracking your sales reps’ daily movements but also streamline all your other sales-related operations.
All product and company names are trademarks™, registered® or copyright© trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.