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Best Practices in Sales Rep Location Tracking

Talk with Sales Reps about a new mobile app that enables Sales Rep Location Tracking and you immediately have nervous Sales Reps.

Talk with Sales Reps about a new mobile app that enables Sales Rep Location Tracking and you immediately have nervous Sales Reps.

In fact, it would make ANY OF US nervous! Who would like the entire organization snooping on their location & trying to figure out what they’ve been up to. All the same, for sales reps, and sales organizations as a whole, location intelligence enables so many possibilities.

The Location tracking challenge in Sales Productivity Solutions

By now at-least 50% of distributed field sales teams would’ve considered switching on location tracking mobile apps for their field teams and 80% of the times, this is to ‘Keep An Eye‘.

1 in 5 conversations we hear how Sales team wants to ‘Uberise‘ their field operations to improve customer delight and boost sales productivity. And 99% of the time such efforts fail due to poor execution or half-baked solutions. Solutions built with the only intent of Policing sales reps almost always Fail. Reactions from Sales reps include “Location tracking is a battery drain” or simply that they wanted privacy!

We see Sales teams keeping Project managers busy by asking for Company-sponsored Data balance, Battery banks and even Devices. In spite of all this, adoption remains low and strange issues crop up every day. Eventually, the Project is shut down, Sales Reps become wary and keep rejecting every new Sales Automation Solution fearing a repeat. Sounds familiar?

All the same, without location intelligence it is difficult to get insight into the sales force activities & correlate with outcomes. And the Sales Managers are back to square one with the same problem:

How to make your Sales operation data-driven if you don’t know what your Sales Reps are doing?

We encounter this challenge with many clients when delivering a mobile lead management solution. And our solution approach has helped Sales Managers boost sales productivity of 1000s of Sales Reps. How did we accomplish this? By making Location Intelligence a two-way street and using Sales Rep Location tracking not for policing but for improving Sales Rep Productivity.

Here is our simple 4-step guide to resolving the Sales Rep Location tracking challenge.

Step 1: Know and leverage the Customer location

By geocoding all the incoming Leads into a lat/long position Vymo identifies ‘Where is the customer?‘. Combine location of all Leads and Vymo plots the Best route for Today, helping Sales Reps tackle all the Leads in an efficient way.

“Vymo helps Sales Managers understand the “Real” location of customers.”

Simply having a route plan for the day, helped Sales Reps reduce failed follow-ups and improved percentage of successful conversions! For one of our clients, we correlated the relationship between meetings per day & distance traveled by sales rep. This helped them identify optimal sales coverage capacity for a given Sales territory.

Notice the 35% of Sales Reps are not meeting any Leads? And nearly 55% of the Sales team is completing 1-3 meeting each day by traveling lesser than 25 kilometres (16 miles) in a day. Intuitively, it makes sense for each Sales Rep to plan at least 3 meetings per day.

Step 2: Balance the Gives-and-Gets of Sales Rep Location Tracking

Vymo added value to Sales reps by being more flexible with Lead allocation.

With Vymo, a Sales rep can begin their Sales day from anywhere by checking for allocated leads & following the optimized route plan. In addition, by enabling location on their device, Sales Reps have access to real-time lead allocation. Say, a new Lead is identified in the vicinity of the Sales Rep, that is instantly allocated to the proximity Rep via real-time allocation. This scenario is attractive for sales reps because they can work from anywhere up to 4 days each week if they stay connected via data and expose location.

“If Sales reps do not share their location, they are bound to come to Office and pickup the leftover leads.“

And we know that no Sales rep wants to toil on Cold Leads and understand benefits of a flexible lead allocation solution. Thus by incentivizing the use of a mobile sales solution, you are effectively drawing your sales reps towards improved reporting & better geo intelligence.

Consider the following analysis on how many Sales reps are doing more than the minimum number of activities expected from them. For this client, the average number of sales activities per day was hovering at 1.3 Sales Activities per Sales Rep per Day. As part of the Sales productivity program, Vymo was rolled out and the benchmarked was doubled to 2.7 Sales Activities per Sales Rep per Day. Using location-aware work allocation 45% of the Sales Reps exceeded the benchmark within 3 months of adopting Vymo. To put that in perspective, Sales Rep activities more-than-doubled in 1 Quarter!

In addition, by exposing their location, Sales Reps can also identify Nearby opportunities.

Step 3: Make Sales Rep Location Tracking Real-Time

As businesses transition to digital, the work plan for a Sales Rep is augmented with real-time leads that are acquired via other marketing channels. In other words, how you allocate leads, in real-time to your field Sales Reps materially impacts your Sales Pipeline conversion.

“Proximity to the lead has a direct impact on the sales conversion.”

Consider the following data from one of our other client. They had a unique problem wherein the Sales Reps often complained that the Sale rarely happened at the Customer’s given location. This had a cascading impact and jeopardized their route & work plans for the day. Vymo identified where the work was expected to happen & compare that with the location where work actually happened.

Turns out, the Sales Reps were right – less than 20% of the work actually happened at the planned location. Up to 80% of the work happened at locations further apart from the customer’s given location. Now, this might be a unique case and not relevant to every business. That said, how the system is enabling & supporting location flexibility for your Sales Rep is crucial. Should the Sales Reps be pulled-up because they deviated from the route plan to address a real customer opportunity? No! Instead the system should dynamically reallocate work for the Sales Rep so they can be productive at their current location. This can be achieved by addressing nearby leads or by dynamically rebuilding a new plan for rest of the day.

This is the core of real-time lead allocation, to help Sales Reps be productive where they are. We wrote more about acing Sales productivity with intelligent work allocation.

Step 4: If Sales Rep Location Tracking feels Creepy for you to use, it probably is

Start with the premise that the system needs to know the Sales Rep location & use that data point to make intelligent decisions.

“Real-time location of the rep was not exposed to Supervisors”

This helps keep Sales operations clean and ensure that there was no policing conversation possible at any time! Sales managers now focus on effective monitoring and reporting vs micromanaging the Sales Reps.

This actually helps Sales Managers on two fronts. First, by nailing the Sales Rep Reporting & Management and Second, by establishing better communication channel which optimized for actions and outcomes rather than administrative tasks.

And this created some amazing results for our clients within 1 Quarter:

  • Sales team comprising over 1000 reps clocked a remarkable 25% increase in Sales conversions.
  • Sales rep meeting rates increased by as much as 50%.
  • Sales managers achieved 100% visibility across the sales channels

And this wasn’t a single instance, Vymo has achieved similar or even better results over and over for some of the top banks and insurance enterprises of Asia.

Finding this sweet spot in your sales operations is the key to higher Sales Productivity.

With over 50,000 sales reps on board, we are validating different types of solutions for user-friendly location tracking to deliver better conversions. Irrespective of the geography, industry and use case, location tracking has come up as a game changer for delivering higher sales productivity.

Got questions? Shoot them at hello@getvymo.com and expect some interesting insights on sales productivity.

Vymo

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