CACI can help companies answer one, two, three or even all four of these questions, and achieve significant improvements in efficiency, so whether you want to do more calls, less driving, have balanced territories or just want to make planning a whole lot easier, there is something for you.

More calls at a lower cost = Increased profit

Whether you are calling on multiples, high street or convenience, it is important to be sure that your reps are spending time with the stores that offer the biggest opportunity.

CACI offer a combination of sophisticated shopping models and market potential data to help clients identify and rank stores based on potential. Appropriate contact strategies can then be applied to ensure that the highest sales uplift is achieved at the lowest cost.

Field personnel spend most of their day doing two things - calling and driving. Most companies have a good idea how much time they need to spend in-call, but invariably do not have an accurate assessment of how much driving they need to do to get around the calls.

Given that driving accounts for an average of 42% of a salesperson's day (Source: The Guardian), it is crucial to know how much driving our field team need to do to identify required headcount - getting this wrong, even by a small degree, will mean employing too many people, which costs a lot of money, or too few people, which will mean missed opportunities.

CACI's InSite FieldForce software can identify exactly how much driving your team need to do to get around your customers, which will give you an accurate headcount - no wasted money, no missed opportunities.

In essence, there a two ways to create a new territory structure - planning or optimising.

Territory planning involves looking at maps, whether they be hard-copy or using basic mapping software, and making manual, subjective allocations of postcodes (and the customers within those postcodes) to field personnel. This is very time-consuming, and hugely inefficient because it doesn't utilise the road network to its full potential.

Territory optimisation involves using the automated algorithm within InSite FieldForce to make efficient, objective allocations of postcode, such that planning time is cut by 70% and the amount of driving your field team end up doing can be cut by up to 32% (Source: The Grocer). It will also identify where to recruit for vacancies, which also has a profound effect on travelling time and mileage, not to mention CO₂ emissions and fuel bills, and can also flex workload to account for the different amounts of driving that will inevitably happen in different parts of the country.

Having achieved the optimised structure, it is still possible to make minor manual amendments to the territory structure that make 'business sense' with little impact on the efficiency of the final structure.

Expecting salespeople to create efficient day-by-day call schedules is unrealistic - they are being asked to take into account the full road network (and what speed they can achieve on each section), different call frequencies and limitations on when some calls can be made, across every day of a call cycle - the options are endless!

So it is inevitable that any plan they do produce themselves, even if they are familiar with their territory, will be highly inefficient and will probably have taken them a long time to put together.

CallSmart, CACI's call scheduling software, will automatically create efficient call schedules in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually, drastically reducing time spent planning and driving, freeing up time for your salespeople to do what you employ them to do - SELL!

Wesleyan

Wesleyan utilised InSite FieldForce software to handle the re-organisation and was impressed by its ability to automatically optimise and balance all of the different territory structures in a fraction of the time it would have taken manually.

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