Capability: Workforce Scheduling

Field sales teams that are the right size and fully utilised are often high-performing. Striking this delicate balance is critical to gaining efficiency in the field, which will result in lower costs and higher sales.

When managing a field sales team – regardless of size – your ultimate goal is to maintain customer service levels and maximise sales opportunities.

There’s a lot of work for your people to do as individuals to achieve that, but you also play a vital role in optimising workloads and giving every field sales person the opportunity to excel.

Many field sales people will be spending a significant amount of time driving, when they could otherwise be selling. When planning, if you get the driving time wrong your headcount will be wrong – it’s an important balance to strike.

Here are three tips to help you better analyse and utilise headcount.

1. Grow your Process, Not Your Workforce

A field sales team is a naturally expensive resource. When you factor in salaries, vehicles, fuel and expenses, bonuses, training, and equipment like laptops and phones, the costs soon mount up. Get the headcount wrong, and it could be costing your company thousands.

But without the right technology in place to combine millions of drive time calculations, it’s impossible to produce something accurate, or indeed discover how you can improve when, where, and how often your field sales people visit customers and prospects.

Optimisation doesn’t necessarily mean operating at 100%. More likely, you’ll want to use 90-95% of a field sales person’s day. That way you can reduce headcount and maintain call coverage, or increase call coverage with your existing team.

Without the right technology in place to combine millions of drive time calculations, it’s impossible to produce something accurate

2. Invest in Efficiency to Maximise ROI

Field sales people do two things: they drive and make calls. Given that driving can account for as much as 34% of a field sales person’s day, it’s critical to know how much driving a field sales team should be doing to be efficient.

Underestimate drive time, and you won’t be able to achieve the call coverage, which means customer service levels will be lower, and you’ll be missing out on valuable sales. Likewise, too many heads will be an unnecessary drain on costs.

The reality is that driving time is different for every call depending on the road network and customer density, so it’s vitally important to get it right first time.

Driving can account for as much as 34% of a field sales person’s day

3. Make Sure You Have the Right Software to Support your Team

Most planners have probably conducted a headcount analysis and factored in call locations, call times and frequencies, call cycles, and working hours of their staff. They may have even attempted to incorporate driving time as well – but this will have been a rudimentary estimate, and ultimately incorrect.

By eliminating human error and uncertainty, field sales teams can extract vast amounts of insight – and new revenue – simply by implementing intelligent software into their process.

Before organisations engage with CACI, we often find that their field-based sales teams are working at around 80% capacity (with some people within the team working at over 100%, or under 60%).

The right software can help you achieve the utilisation that is right for your business and give you the confidence that you can hit your coverage targets.

Headcount Analysis: Sell More, Save Money

Before you can make a big decision like increasing headcount, you need the full facts backed by hard, reliable data. Without it, you’re merely going off your best judgement and guess-work.

The majority of companies we come across have around 10% more headcount than is necessary.

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s Field Force expertise can help you, get in contact now.

Your field sales people are exactly that – sales people. So why are they unnecessarily organising their own call schedules? It’s time for them to focus on what they do best – and technology holds the answer.

Think about how valuable field sales reps are to your organisation. Certainly, the best talent can bear significant fruit, and the more customers you put them in front of, the more sales you’re going to make.

So, when your field sales reps’ time is so valuable, why would you have them spend precious time planning their own call schedules, when they could be selling?

Manual route planning by field sales reps is far from efficient, and ultimately results in:

• More time spent routing than selling
• Higher mileage bills and carbon emissions
• Disconnects between corporate and personal goals
• Missed call and revenue opportunities

Experienced Reps Versus An Algorithm

There’s no doubt that field sales teams are extremely expensive to run. To make a positive return on this investment, you need to ensure your reps are driving less, and crucially, selling more. And it’s important to recognise that the skills that make great field sales people don’t necessarily make expert call schedulers and route planners. It simply shouldn’t be part of their job role.

Consider the number of variables: visits and drivetimes, worktime legislation, overnight stops, visit restrictions, decision maker availability, other events, the rurality of certain areas – the list can be endless.

The level of information required to make a quick and accurate set of route calculations is far beyond any human (more than 3.6 million for a day consisting of only ten calls).

The Right Software Can Reduce Time Spent Driving By Up to 20%

So, no matter how experienced the field sales person, they will never be able to achieve an optimal sequence of calls on their own, and their priority should always be selling.

A solution such as CACI’s CallSmart has the ability to optimise your team’s daily routes for each territory, and help your field sales reps reduce their mileage and maximise their calls – without taxing their valuable time.

Not only can the right software reduce time spent driving by up to 20%, automatically optimising routes for the whole team across the call cycle, means your company will spend up to 70% less time planning.

Less Driving, Fewer Emissions

Businesses are increasingly challenged to be more efficient in terms of their environmental impact. And the bigger the company, the greater the pressure. Indeed, most annual reports now devote entire sections to sustainability, and many have signed up to climate change goals.

By reducing driving time you’ll save money and also reduce carbon emissions.

But for most field sales teams, driving is an unavoidable activity, and often the only sensible way to travel around the country quickly.

So by reducing driving time, you’ll not only save money, but you’ll also reduce carbon emissions.

The Field Sales Team Planning Solution

While some field sales reps will be confident that they know the best way to schedule their calls, the fact is, it’s an impossibility. Automated software solutions are proven to yield far greater efficiency and greater revenues.

Aside from the fact that it’s impossible to factor in millions of calculations into planning decisions without software, the expense of running a field sales team, combined with inefficient call schedules affecting bottom lines, the case for automated call scheduling has never been greater.

CACI’s CallSmart software removes the guesswork by automatically identifying the most efficient call sequence for field sales reps. Many organisations are already seeing the benefits of CallSmart with 20% average reduction in drive time and fewer miles travelled.

Territory optimisation is all about field sales reps being in the right place, with the ability to deliver more calls with less driving. But to create a drive time efficient, balanced, territory structure, planners must look beyond manual methods and simple postcode allocations for the answer…

In a perfect world, each of your field sales reps would be working exactly the same hours, consistently hitting their targets and doing so with minimal driving.

In reality, there’s no field sales team in the world that can manage this level of perfection, or indeed balance everything they need to do on their own.

Manual methods are highly subjective, time consuming, and often create significant Inefficiencies. For example, a manually created territory structure (with no drive time factored in), will probably have:

1. Reps living in the wrong locations
2. Unnecessary driving time
3. Imbalanced territories

The average sales territory imbalance stands at around 18%

With drive time efficient, workload balanced territories; your field sales team’s overall call coverage greatly increases. This means less time driving, and more time with clients to hit your KPIs and develop new business opportunities.

Workload Imbalance

The reality is that driving is unproductive, expensive, and results in fewer calls being made than could otherwise be achieved. It is also a contributing factor to why the average sales territory imbalance stands at around 18%.

To put that into perspective, overworked territories could be trying to squeeze in as much as six days work into a five-day week. Compare that to team members who are underworked and only working four out of five days in reality and plugging the gaps with low value visits, and you’ve got a potential recipe for disaster.

The only effective way to redress this imbalance is by using applications that can make precise calculations based on captured information such as where field sales reps live, the road network, call locations, visit frequencies and visit durations.

It’s a level of accuracy which simply can’t be achieved with manual methods.

With the right software and data at your fingertips, you can automatically create territories that are workload balanced and drive time compact.

Missed Sales Opportunities

Territory imbalance also has a very real effect on the bottom line.

Imbalanced territories can lead to many customers (both current and potential) being overlooked by reps who are overstretched. Likewise, if a territory is underworked, field sales reps that could be making more calls and selling more, simply aren’t doing so.

Fixing an Imbalanced Territory Structure Can Increase Call Coverage By 3%

Effect on Team Members

It’s not only revenues which are affected by imbalanced territories and too much driving. Unnecessary pressure on field sales reps and unachievable targets in the time they have can create a perfect storm of dissatisfaction, feelings of unappreciation, and long commutes which create a poor work-life balance.

This can result in high staff turnover, valuable knowledge and skills being lost, and underserved customers. The cost of your field sales team is already high, so whatever you can do to limit staff turnover will help your bottom line.

Optimised Territories Demand Sophisticated Software

Territory division in field sales is quite literally a balancing act, and requires sophisticated algorithms to manage the complex combination of geography, customer locations, and rep locations.

The penalties for getting it wrong are not only negative impacts on the bottom line but also client relationships.

CACI’s InSite FieldForce software can help you achieve a better balance. You can not only achieve a balanced and efficient territory, but you can also significantly reduce drive time, increase staff retention, and grow revenues.

Like many other organisations, your territories could be 18% imbalanced. Get in touch with us to find out if you could increase your call coverage by 3% and do more with less.

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s Field Force expertise can help you, get in contact now.