MarketForce One Feature: Introducing the Route Plan Approval Feature
At MarketForce, we are always at work to create the most comprehensive field sales automation platform. Today we want to introduce you to one of our most recent features: Route Plan Approval Feature.
WHAT IS ROUTE PLANNING?
The Sales Route Planning is the process of finding the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B, which facilitates sales reps in the field, enabling them to identify, understand, and navigate their most impactful opportunities. Route planning considers multiple factors, such as target market strategies, market dynamics, competitor actions, and client status and engagement. This is often a very critical sales tactics to any organization. Furthermore, Route Planning helps team leaders and branch managers to plan the agents’ daily activities, and to direct them to the right places at the right time. This makes the sales process optimized, efficient, and streamlined.
WHY ROUTE PLANNING WITH MARKETFORCE?
Any field sales reps is aware of the frustrations and challenges involved in planning an efficient route on a daily basis. And the frustrations continue for team leaders and sales managers in making an attempt to keep track and monitor their sales reps’ activities when they are out on the field. It can also be time consuming for team leaders and sales managers when they manually assign routes to agents. The MarketForce route planning feature aims to accomplish the maximum, in a very short time and guarantee maximum productivity for sales-related activities.
WHY ROUTE PLANNING APPROVAL?
To maximize the productivity and effectiveness of the field agents while they are on the assigned route, Financial Services companies often disburse transport allowances, petty cash, and other facilitations for each agent on a given route. They also provide the agents with marketing material, e.g. brochures and merchandising. Since the route planning process has clear financial implications, it is crucial to assign the correct route plans, to the right people and for the right locations. If not done well, the company risks to waste money by sending their agents to locations with low potential, and to obtain poor ROI out of the expenditure they allocate to allowances and marketing material.
To help companies to avoid this, at MarketForce we have further upgraded our Route Plan Module by introducing the route plan approval feature. With such feature, every time a team leader creates a route for a given number of sales agents, an automatic email is sent to their direct supervisor, notifying them that the team leader has requested to approve the route.
If the supervisor approves the new route, the team leader will be automatically notified that the route has been approved, and the agents assigned to the route will also receive an automatic notification on their mobile phones, notifying them that they have a new route to fulfill.
On the other hand, if the team leader’s supervisor rejects the route, the team leader received an automatic notification that the route has been rejected, while the sales agents will not receive the route at all, so it is guaranteed that they will not follow routes that they are not supposed to follow.
REAL-TIME VISIBILITY ON ROUTE PLANS
On top of setting up route plans and approvals, managers want to see how agents are performing on routes and what is the ROI.
The MarketForce One Route Plan Dashboard provides an overview details of every route assigned to a particular/s sales rep/s. The supervisors and managers get a full visibility of all routes submissions; each routes approval status whether it is pending, approved or rejected; which routes have expired or are still active; which sales reps. have been to which routes; and finally, what is the fulfillment rate for each route, measured as ratio between the total number of assigned locations and the number of location visited.
The route-approval feature helps your organization save time and cost as you do not risk sending your sales reps to unnecessary location. Additionally, it makes inventory/allowances disbursement transparent and measurable. The route-approval feature can be activated or deactivated at any point in time by admin users, so to personalize the MarketForce system to your company’s policies and practices.
Do you want to learn more about the route-approval feature and how to keep your sales team super productive by getting most out of every day in the field with the right technology? Get in touch with us today.