When sales numbers decline quarter after quarter, figuring out the cause and addressing it becomes your top priority. Sometimes it comes from factors entirely outside your control — a temporary change in the industry, economic recession, or even a rough quarter for everyone.
If the slump falls within your control, it’s tempting to increase investment: add more salespeople and drivers to conduct more meetings and move more products.
This approach doesn’t work well. Employees cost money. They eat into the bottom line, and your company breaks even once again — while it takes on the added stress of a larger client base.
Instead, we recommend a sales route mapping program so you can do less with more.
There are two possible causes of decreasing sales:
Geography and range limit the area of any business that sells and ships tangible products. Any area has a limited number of customers. Since those customers bring regular sales you can rely upon quarter after quarter, it’s important to court those local clients and maintain good relationships with them to the absolute best of your ability.
Sales drop off if customers don’t think they can trust you. But if you increase your efficiency with route optimization software, you can restore some of that trust. You do more than deliver a quality product — you deliver more of it, and it arrives on time.
Adding more drivers to create higher sales numbers without an optimized route means you’ll need to keep hiring more drivers to convert more prospects.
Route optimization helps you use your existing assets more efficiently instead of continuing to build a suboptimal fleet. It’s all about maximizing the benefits of what you have. Working smarter, not harder.
Monitoring key performance metrics like your gas budget helps you find a balance as you confirm you’ve found an effective sales enablement tool. These metrics convey how well the streamlining process is going.
When failing to close a sale or losing a contract, the best approach is to analyze what went wrong and then try again.
But it’s easier to make a great first impression and start from scratch with someone else than it is to mend a broken relationship. Overcoming the initial pain point is hard, even though everyone knows leveraging past benefits can easily bring new sales in the future.
With the high cost of entry involving emotions, negotiations, and time, reopening negotiations with former clients often ends up on the back burner.
Sales route optimization makes a return to form with previous clients possible. Since it streamlines your sales agents’ routes, it allows them to add more stops to their in-person call routes every day.
Suddenly, they have the time to work through their queue of prospects and work on their pitch to bring former clients back into the fold. When they arrive punctually and unstressed by traffic, they increase the odds of a new, better first impression.
With this work, they take the first steps toward forming a new long-lasting relationship with a customer who sees firsthand that you have a vested interest in rewarding their loyalty, treating them with dignity, and not giving up on them.
When you come to your drivers with a plan to streamline their routes (framed as a way to make their lives easier, not micromanage their routine), you increase morale and efficiency.
If boots on the ground know you have a plan and can clearly see why you’ve chosen your current route, they’re more likely to carry it out — and walk into meetings with a spring in their step.
