Capability: Workforce Scheduling

In previous articles we’ve discussed if your sales reps should be generalists or specialists, the utilisation of your sales team and developing fair and balanced territories.

Now, we’re going to address the link between smart recruitment and commuting. Historically, the amount of commuting a rep does at the start and end of each day has been viewed as pretty much irrelevant; it is just something a rep has had to withstand and cope with. Even to the point of opting out of legislation that sought to acknowledge, measure and limit it.

Well, in the words of the reluctant Nobel prize winner, Bob Dylan, times are a changin’. Whether it will be in the light of recent court judgements (such as one involving Tyco at the European Court of Justice), or simply that society and, to some extent, companies themselves are seeing the benefits of employees having a better work-life balance, a sales rep having to do a large slice of ‘invisible’ work is getting less and less acceptable by the day.

So, if we are going to start including commuting in a rep’s working hours, what does that mean for their employer? Well, probably that they are likely to need a bigger sales force if they want to keep calling on all their customers with the current contact strategy. Or maybe it will mean having to slice and dice the call file, with lower-value and more remote customers no longer receiving a visit.

Given that this might well jeopardise sales revenues, it is certain that any company will want to mitigate the impact of commuting. Which is why the following statistic is so compelling – that is that the impact of recruiting in the wrong location can lead to sales reps having to commute a whopping 43% more than if we can recruit them in the ideal location – the average was actually just over 30%.

Recruiting in ideal locations can reduce commute driving by 43%

Now, we are not saying that we are living in an ideal world where we can just recruit a great salesperson in an ideal location. However, next time you have a vacancy, rather than take the easy option of recruiting their replacement in the same vicinity as your leaver, why not do some proper analysis? Consider the passage of time, churn in your customer base, attrition in your sales team, and changes in the road network. Could the easy option also be a very costly one?

The next part of this series will focus on frequency patterns and travel times.

We’re on to our third principle of effective field force planning – the first being generalists or specialists, and the second; utilisation of field sales teams.

Principle 3 is about workload balance – in an ideal world, all your field sales reps would be working the same hours. Our experience, based on analysing thousands of existing territory structures, is that this goal is very, very rarely (if ever) achieved without using sophisticated software.

In fact, the average territory workload imbalance is 18% – in real terms, for those territories that are 18% overworked, this is the equivalent of them trying to squeeze 6 days’ work into 5 days. This can only lead to a potentially nasty cocktail of long hours, frustrated customers and high staff turnover. For those at the other end of the spectrum, at 18% underworked, they will be paid a full wage whilst only being effective for 4 days each week, which obviously means they could be doing more calls and selling more product. Given these outcomes, it is hardly surprising that in a 2018 study by CACI, correcting these imbalances of +/-18% enables 4.5% more calls to be achieved – yes, it’s a huge problem!

Before companies engage with CACI their field base teams are about 18% imbalanced

So, how do we end up with territory imbalance? Well, the single biggest factor is a lack of appreciation, and measurement, of how much driving a sales rep needs to do in their patch. Companies will often share out calls between territories such that each territory has the same number of visits to do, and believe that this will deliver a balanced workload across their team. Unfortunately, the nature of road networks and geography (in every country around the world) will mean that some territories will have a much higher component of driving within their working day, and vice versa. So what initially appeared balanced is suddenly completely imbalanced!

Trying to understand road networks is not a trivial challenge. A country’s road networks will often contain more than a million separate stretches of road and a similar number of junctions. Roads operate at very different speeds too, and junctions have very different delay times – it’s enough to blow your mind, and certainly too much to think about.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that you can’t expect balanced territories and enjoy the benefits associated with equitable workloads without having the tools in place to understand how much driving every single rep in your team is likely to rack up.

In the next blog we’ll look at the next principle of effective field force planning – the link between recruitment and commuting.

In part one of this blog series we discussed whether you can optimise your field sales team by splitting them into generalists and/or specialists. This second instalment looks at the next principle – the level of utilisation we see companies’ sales teams operating at.

Sometimes we see companies that are expecting too much from their field sales teams, with workloads up to 110% of the time a rep has available! This is clearly impossible – unsurprisingly, these companies typically have a very high level of staff attrition, and disgruntled customers. More commonly, companies have field sales teams that are underused, often being busy for as little as 60% of their day. Why would a company pay their reps a full-time wage when they are really only effective part-time?Now, CACI isn’t advocating aiming for 100% utilisation (when we talk about utilisation, we are including time in call, time driving and also lunch, administration, team meetings etc) – this is unrealistic. Calls don’t always go to plan, so a bit of contingency is sensible – our experience suggests a utilisation between 90-95% of a salesperson’s day is achievable. As mentioned earlier, we regularly see teams that are very much underworked and, less often, teams that are being asked to do more than is possible. However, the average level of utilisation before working with CACI is, as shown in the graphic, only 80% – this is quite a gap from what is possible, and means companies could be doing more calls with their existing team or the same call levels with a lower headcount – sell more, or save money, that’s your call!

Before companies engage with CACI their field teams are approximately 80% utilised

The next blog will look at the challenge of developing fair and balanced territories.

Field sales teams are very expensive to run, even if they are operated and structured efficiently. These costs have the potential to spiral out of control without the appropriate tools and processes in place to achieve efficiency. However, even with the right tools and processes, decisions about strategy and operational matters can mean that you end up with a bloated, inefficient sales team that delivers way less than it could do, at much higher cost – a real LOSE:LOSE.

It’s these decisions and choices that we will cover in this Seven Principles of Effective Field Force Planning blog series.

Generalists of Specialist

Our first principle is one for anyone who is considering putting separate teams into different retail sectors, such as wondering whether to have a combined convenience/grocery multiples (or modern/traditional trade) team (generalists), or whether to have a separate team for each sector (specialists). There are probably a number of reasons why you are considering these strategies, but it is worth incorporating the impact on headcount and mileage of the different approaches into your decision-making. Our findings, based on thousands of projects over the years, are shown below:

Splitting a team of generalists into two specialist teams can increase your headcount by 10% and mileage by 20%

It is not surprising that generalists will do less driving, as they will have smaller territories, but does the likely reduction in fuel and headcount costs, allied to increased call rates, outweigh the potential increase in revenue per call from specialisation?

The next blog will look at the level of utilisation that a typical company’s sales team is operating at.

Our recent blog titled How much does it cost your business to replace a field sales rep highlighted the cost can be as much as €103,655 ($115,000). Once you’ve found the right person for the job, you will want to maximise your chances of retaining them.

Reps move on for several reasons, but the decisions you make when deciding where to recruit, how you adjust your territories to accommodate that recruit, and your approach to route optimisation will have an impact on staff retention.

The Impact of Recruiting in the Wrong Location

So, you’ve finally found the perfect field sales rep who has all the credentials you want but they live off patch. What would you do? Employ them? Or take a step back and consider the potential impact on their longevity, other reps, and ultimately the success of your business?

I often hear people say ‘I want the best person with the best skill set for the job’ which is of course critical to success, but recruiting a good candidate in the best location can be more effective than recruiting the best candidate in a poor location, especially if you want to retain talent.

If you decide to recruit off patch your new rep will have to spend more time driving on to their territory every day which, whilst tolerable at first, will quickly become frustrating and stressful. They might say “it’ll be fine, I’ll handle it”, but in our experience, it seldom is. Depending on your approach to commuting (let’s not open the can of worms right now on whether the drive to first visit, and home from last visit should be viewed as falling inside or outside working hours), this could mean they have little choice than to work longer hours than their peers. Call rates will inevitably suffer resulting in lost opportunities and lower sales, not to mention morale.

Over time, poorly sited recruits will cumulatively give you a headache. When several people live in the wrong place you can’t change the territories to suit the needs of the business. You are locked in a situation where you want to make change to be more efficient, but your hands are tied and you find yourself giving people too much, or too little work because there’s no other way of cutting it. It doesn’t need to be that way. Recruiting in the ideal location, or close to that ideal location can lead to sales reps having to commute 43% less than if you recruit them in the wrong location.

Do You Really Need an Extra Head?

Reassessing whether you have a drive time efficient, balanced territory structure could mean you don’t have to recruit at all. The next time you have a vacancy, it’s worth considering if recruiting a replacement is necessary. It often isn’t! Instead, take the time to review your customer base and team workloads, and crucially include a robust measure of the time reps spend behind the wheel, which is often described as the hidden workload of a sales rep. This will confirm the size of the field sales team needed before you assume you need to recruit again. Efficiency often means being able to cover more work with the same headcount and makes recruitment unnecessary.

Optimising an ideal territory scenario that is driven by where your customers are located, rather than where your staff live, can be hugely insightful and bring to light a much more cost-effective field deployment that highlights the true gaps in your field sales network.

What’s the Impact of an Imbalanced Territory Structure?

When we run data on current team deployments through our application, InSite FieldForce, we see that the average territory workload imbalance is 18%. This is the equivalent to a rep trying to fit 6 days’ worth of work into 5, which leads to the new rep having to work longer hours to achieve the KPI’s set, confounded by frustrated customers who haven’t received a visit due to the territory previously being vacant.

The biggest cause of stress at work, according to this LinkedIn survey is workload and a poor work-life balance which is a concern for more and more companies. Territory and route optimisation will help ensure corporate goals of hitting a certain number of visits per day, and personal goals of leaving and getting home at a reasonable hour, can both be achieved. CACI has investigated the effects of work-life balance and how it can affect a field sales team. If you’d like more information, click here to download our white paper.

What you need is for all your reps to be working the same hours and living on patch. Our experience tells us that that this goal is rarely achieved without leveraging an optimisation tool coupled with a solid process of change management.

Optimised Call Schedules Will Help a New Field Sales Rep Hit the Ground Running

Giving a new rep an optimised call schedule for the next call cycle will help them hit the ground running and helps ensure that your route to market strategy is delivered, and the rep maximises every opportunity.

Imagine you’re a new rep and you have been given the task of building a journey plan for the next call cycle. You must consider visit locations, call frequency, drive time, decision maker availability, and a whole lot more. Even an experienced field sales rep will never be able to achieve an optimal sequence of calls on their own – despite their insistence that they ‘know their patch’ – and their priority should always be selling. You need to ensure your reps are driving less and selling more. CACI’s route optimisation software CallSmart can reduce driving time by as much as 22% in a fraction of the time it takes a rep to do manually.

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force optimisation software & expertise can help your company retain field sales talent, get in touch now.

Discover Why Turnover in Your Field Team Could be Costing You Millions…And What To Do About It

Hiring new sales people isn’t an activity that most people enjoy… unless they’re a recruitment consultant who makes commission on it! I certainly didn’t enjoy my last round of recruitment. It took nine months…that’s right, nine months to source the right candidate. I could have created a new human being in that time (though the time required to upskill that individual would have been impractical for recruitment purposes!).

Recruitment distracted me from my day job: I’m sure everyone involved in this activity would empathise with me. Anecdotally, every new recruit takes up six or seven working days from existing managers and thus affects everyday operational performance.

Unfortunately, for sales leaders, the problem rears its ugly head even more often than for their peers in other disciplines, with the Harvard Business Review (2017) finding that turnover of salespeople is around 27% a year – more than double the rate in other business functions – with a LinkedIn study the same year putting the figure as high as a staggering 35%.

Finding the right person for a role is a time-consuming business and very few organisations can claim a 100% success rate, however rigorously they screen, assess and interview candidates. A global survey conducted online by Harris Interactive, canvassing more than 6,000 hiring managers and HR professionals, found that over half the companies had been affected by a bad hire.

If you’re recruiting to grow your team, that’s a good news story, but even so, bringing new people into a well-balanced field team can create tensions and pressures that affect performance. If you’re hiring to replace a trusted team member who’s moved on, it can be hard for a newbie to step into their shoes and the team’s stability may suffer.

Putting a Price on the Gaps

It’s a rare situation when one sales rep seamlessly hands on the baton to their successor. More commonly, there’s a gap when a territory is left exposed. Sales education specialist De Paul University estimated that it takes an average of just over six months to fill an open position.

That may be higher for field sales, lost sales on that territory could make a €45,068 ($50,000) dent in your bottom line, according to De Paul University, during the period when your competitors are influencing key decision makers, unchallenged. Of course, it depends what you’re selling and to whom, but that figure could equally be an underestimate if you’re in the market to sell or merchandise higher value goods or tech.

How do you measure the impact on current and future revenue if customers or outlets miss one, two or half a dozen regular visits? What happens to the rest of the team’s performance if they’re asked to step up and cover the missing rep’s client calls while you find and induct a replacement?

If you have the data, you might be able to quantify a drop in the orders your reps or place or sales they record, and observe a rise in the popularity of your rivals’ goods amongst your customers. How long will it take to reverse that trend across neglected outlets? You might never make up the ground without extra investment in promotions or support to tempt them back.

The Total Cost of Recruitment, Induction and Training

Recruitment is one cost that’s fairly easy to size, in terms of advertising, agency fees, interviewing, HR admin, induction and equipping a starter. De Paul University conducted research in the US into the cost of sales rep turnover. They estimate €26,139 ($29,000) for hiring, up to the point when the new candidate walks in on day one and training typically adds €32,449 ($36,000): even a skilled and experienced rep from a direct competitor needs to learn about your organisation’s processes, your products, your systems and tools and unfamiliar customer accounts.

Maximum Alertness, Minimum Recruitment

The total estimated cost of replacing a rep, according to De Paul University, is therefore €103,655 ($115,000). What’s your turnover rate? Using Harvard Business Review (2017) figures, if you have 27 reps per year moving on, your organisation has lost over €2,817,912 ($3,105,000) in profit. And in a profession where skills are transferable and high performers are in demand, there’s plenty of pressure on employers to retain their best people.

Managers of rep teams and divisions need to keep an eagle eye on trends and factors that influence attrition – through observation, good communication with reps and from data analytics. Any warning sign of increasing rep turnover needs investigating. When reps move on, it’s critical to find out why.

There are things you can do to minimise ‘push’ factors: work-life balance is a key priority. In our thirty years as Field Sales Planning specialists we’ve seen businesses get this wrong time and time again. If you have too many reps, staffing and associated costs are higher than they should be as well as reps being under-utilised. If there are too few, reps will feel stressed, overworked and generally disgruntled. Either scenario can fuel attrition, forcing a business to recruit once again and perpetuate operational instability and a lack of coverage.

Recent analysis by CACI shows that 32% of a sales person’s time is spent behind the wheel, the impact of recruiting in the wrong location can lead to sales reps having to commute a whopping 43% more than if we can recruit them in the ideal location.

Breaking The Cycle: How to Sustain an Optimal Rep Team

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s Field Force expertise can help your company reduce recruitment costs, improve rep retention rates through better work-life balance and employ the right number of field sales reps in the right location, get in touch now.

CACI has investigated the effects of work-life balance and how it can affect a field sales team. If you’d like more information click here to download our white paper.

The amount of time your sales reps spend behind the wheel has a direct impact on their call rates and fundamentally, their ability to generate sales.

34% – the average amount of time a sales rep spends behind the wheel

Route optimisation is how you can get your sales reps to reach their full potential. The benefits of this are well documented, but implementing that change using technology has pitfalls. I’ve spent most of my professional career helping people like you weigh up the options when it comes to route planning tools, and guiding them around those pitfalls. There are several options when it comes to route optimisation. The word “Dynamic” is increasingly used, but few people seem to agree what that means, and what it looks like in the hands of a sales rep. This breeds confusion and hinders decision making:

In my experience, you have three options:

1. Static: Optimise the sales reps route for them
2. Agile: Help your sales reps optimise their route
3. Dynamic: Let your sales reps optimise their own route

The differentiator between these three is the amount of help you give the reps, the form that help takes, and ultimately where the responsibility of optimisation sits.

Static – Do It for Them

You decide on a preconceived contact strategy which dictates the visits that are to be scheduled, and a timescale over which they need to be accomplished (typically 1-12 weeks). By using a piece of software with an integrated algorithm you can build an efficient schedule. That algorithm builds in travel time, as well as other factors such as customers needing more than one visit, and customer availability. That schedule is then deployed to the field. This can lead to efficiencies across the board.

We call this Static because changes to the route are not made by the software, and the routes in each call cycle tend to look a lot like the last. Instead, the reps are empowered to manage that schedule with guidelines on what adjustments they can make to their own diary should change be needed. At the end of the call cycle the process is repeated with the schedule adjusted to take into account new and lost customers. I have seen a small slow-down in the number of companies opting for this, it is still by far the most commonly implemented technology based solution.

Agile – Help Them Do It

There is huge potential for including measures of customer value into route optimisation. Doing so will help an organisation get an even better return on investment from their field sales team by visiting the right customers at the right time. I recall a customer of CACI’s, Yakult, doing this 12 years ago, and building routes on a weekly basis to only those customers whom EPOS data identified as being most in need of a visit. At the time they were unique in this approach, but it proved very successful.

CACI helped us drive out inefficiencies, improve utilisation and reduce costs. We also have a happier, more productive field sales force driving huge benefits to our bottom line

This approach assumes a degree of flexibility in the selection of the customers you decide to visit and a reps schedule can change drastically from one call cycle to the next. The reality is, not all customers are equally important every call cycle. I noticed agile re-emerge as a mainstream approach to route optimisation about 3 years ago, and today data-driven route planning is gaining a lot of traction. An Agile approach introduces value to the route optimisation process, it questions the value of calling on each customer and summarise that value as a single priority score. That priority score determines whether it will be routed in the call cycle or not.

Software is used to build an efficient schedule, but now the priority score lets the algorithm recognise the most important customers to schedule and factor their relative value into the decision-making process. That schedule tends to be shorter than Static planning, typically 1-4 weeks, due to the data refresh cycle of your priority score.

Dynamic – Let Them Do It

The fall-back approach to route planning is to let reps do it themselves. This can be the least efficient method as we know that those routes have 20% more driving than those created by an algorithm **. But a new Dynamic approach combines the knowledge of the sales rep and the power of an algorithm to produce more effective and optimised routes.

Workforce management apps have brought a new dimension to managing field sales people, enabling you to communicate easily with your reps, and allowing them to capture data and report back to you over the course of their day. With technology firmly in their hands many options are emerging to return to reps planning their own routes, but with an algorithm at their fingertips.

Dynamic can be great if your people often have their day disrupted by external factors such as visits over running, or finding that the decision-maker is not available when they arrive. It allows them to re-optimise their own diary on the move.

Summary

In my experience static is still the most common, with a shift towards agile. CACI have been helping organisations schedule efficient routes whatever their preferred method. CACI have been delivering both since they came into being, and we are pleased to be releasing the latest version of our route optimisation software, CallSmart, via the cloud so that you can optimise routes faster than ever before.

Dynamic comes with some question marks because it is something that is still being refined by technology companies. Our approach to dynamic has been to make CallSmart’s optimisation algorithm available via your own workforce management app giving you the flexibility to employ it as you see fit.