How to manage travel
efficiently
One of your biggest sales assets
is time and how you use it.
In short, your time is most valuable to
you when you are in front of qualified customers, or talking
with them on the phone, not traveling long distances to reach
a potential customer at the end of your territory, sitting
in traffic, or skipping around to make calls.
In simple terms, the best way to manage
your face-to-face selling time is to control or manage your
travel. This can be accomplished efficiently and effectively
by following three specific guidelines:
1. Segment your territory
2. Use travel patterns
3. Discipline to Compartmentalize Activity
#1. Segment your territory into
5-8 areas.
Most Acme territories are reasonably
large in terms of geography and contain thousands of potential
customers. The ideal way to segment your territory would be
to divide it into five equal areas or divisions, containing
about the same geography and potential. However, you may have
a widespread suburban territory or one that is relatively
compact, so in either case you could segment it into more
than five areas, possibly as many as eight.
Why five areas?
Five will be the minimum because most
salespeople plan their itineraries around a five day week,
and you must know in advance which day you will be in each
area so you can schedule appointments, call backs, or face-to-
face prospecting.
In some territories, it may make sense
to carve out more than five areas. For example, if you have
a very widespread territory with lots of travel. This might
mandate more intensive segmentation so you don’t have
to jump around too much and can reach “pockets”
of prospects easily.
In summary, the objective of segmentation
is to help you focus on one area per day (possibly jumping
to an adjacent one if it is close) so you are in proximity
to your appointments/prospecting calls with minimum downtime
caused by car time. This process also enables you to plan
ahead for appointments and callbacks since you will ideally
be rotating areas on a weekly basis and will know in advance
which day you will be where.
#2. Use effective travel patterns
to cover each area.
Depending on the size of your territory,
you may have to utilize a variety of routing methods to cover
each area efficiently. A sales representative covering 1-2
compact counties in New Jersey, or a large metropolitan area
like Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco, will have a different
challenge than someone working a territory in Ohio with heavy
windshield time between major cities or markets.
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