More miles rarely mean more sales. In fact, the more time a field sales rep spends behind the wheel, the less time they spend in front of customers. That’s the trap. Windshield time eats into selling time—and selling time is what pays the bills.
Here's how to take control of the road and make your territory work for you.
Mornings shouldn’t start with a guessing game. Reps lose hours every week bouncing between appointments that could’ve been optimized with a little planning.
Plan your meetings ahead of time. Create multi-stop route templates.
Stack your visits by geography. If you’re heading north, see everyone north. Use calendar holds to block tight, back-to-back visit slots. Avoid dead time between appointments.
Use RepMove to create visit plans into the most efficient order. Done the night before, this eliminates scramble and maximizes visits per gallon.
Traffic happens. Appointments cancel. Customers ghost you. But reps still drive like they’re locked into the original plan.
Don’t.
Modern tools like RepMove reroute on the fly. Drag canceled stops out, add new ones in, and automatically recalculate the fastest path. Your CRM should adapt to your day—not make you fight it. When reps adjust in real-time, they recover visits instead of wasting hours.
You wouldn’t mow your lawn randomly and hope you hit every blade. Why treat your territory that way?
Segment your accounts by zones—zip code, city, whatever makes sense. Then rotate those zones on a predictable cadence. You’ll prevent duplicate driving, increase coverage consistency, and get more face time with high-value accounts.
Too many reps burn time zigzagging all over. The best ones sweep methodically and stay present where it matters.
Not every customer fire needs a field rep’s immediate response. This is one of the main destroyers of time management. Sure, customer service should be highly valued, but there are tiers of urgency. If you have a team, delegate as much as possible.
Reps often derail their whole day for something that could’ve been solved with one call to inside sales or customer support. Delegate the low-urgency stuff—billing questions, delivery ETAs, paperwork—to support or customer success. Set clear triage rules: urgent = go; everything else = call it in.
Reps are closers, not errand runners.
First things first. Do not distract yourself while driving. But you can be efficient between meetings.
Typing notes in a parked truck wastes time. So reps often skip it. Then forget it. Then lose the sale.
Fix that.
On your way out of a meeting, say “Hey Siri, note to self” and talk. Stream of consciousness. Doesn’t matter. Just get out the key details before you lose them. Later, paste it into RepMove. Let AI rewrite it into a clean summary, log it to the account, and trigger the next steps. Voice → note → CRM → follow-up. No typing. No delay.
If you’re going to be behind the wheel, make it count.
Find an outside sales expert and listen to their content. It doesn’t get better than Elliott Vigil. He’s a master outside sales trainer from the equipment rental world, but his tips and tricks are relevant for any industry. Check out his training library and queue it up.
You can also download sales podcasts. Pick one topic and study it all week—objection handling, closing techniques, time management. Reps who treat drive time as study time pick up extra reps, extra closes, and extra commission.
Smart reps learn. Smarter reps learn while driving.
Want to turn more windshield time into time in front of customers? Get the RepMove app and take back your hours. Sign up for a free trial. Every drive you shorten is another customer you can meet. These stack up and turn into revenue.
