trakki
Field sales tips: what helps after years in the car
By Manuel Ober · · 7 min read
The week belongs to Friday
Ten minutes on Friday afternoon save you more than an hour the following week. If you decide every morning where to drive, you lose three times over: while you think about it, on the detour, and in the evening, when the important customer still has not been seen.
The questions on Friday are always the same. Who is due? Where are the due customers? What fits into one day? How to answer them is in the guide Route planning in field sales.
Six visits, not eight
Plan for six visits a day, with one of the six as your buffer: the visit that can drop out if the day runs long. On paper, eight fit. On the road, six is what a normal day holds, because waiting, hunting for a parking space and a conversation that runs a quarter of an hour over all eat into the day. And drive times in the plan are usually shorter than on the road.
Plan for six with a buffer and the week holds. Plan for eight and you are pushing visits ahead of you from Tuesday and rebuilding the whole week on Thursday.
Visit customers who are close together on one day
Put customers who are close together on the same day. Five customers within twenty minutes of each other is a good day. The opposite is the star pattern: from home to one customer in the morning, back home, out again to the next. That is mileage without revenue.
Which customers are close together you only see on a map, never in a list. So put your customer list on a map once, even if you think you know the territory. How that works is in the guide Get your Excel customer list onto a map.
The difficult customer comes in the morning
Put the conversation you are avoiding in the morning. At 16:30 it is not going to get any easier. In the morning you are sharper, so is the customer, and if it goes badly you still have half a day to get over it.
The pleasant short visits belong in the late afternoon. They take little concentration and rescue the day when something earlier fell through.
Opening hours are planning, not luck
Write down your customers' opening hours before you plan. Pharmacies close at lunchtime, doctors' practices are shut one or two afternoons a week, workshops take nobody after 16:00. Leave that out of the plan and you stand in front of a locked door and drive off again.
One line against the customer in your list is enough: closed Wednesday afternoon, Friday only until 12. Over a year it saves you several wasted trips.
Cancellations only cost you if you are unprepared
Plan the gap before the cancellation comes. Someone cancels every week. The only question is what you do with the two free hours.
Two things help. Keep a short list of customers in the territory who need no appointment and will see you at short notice. And re-plan the rest of the day instead of sitting out the gap: pull the afternoon forward, add a visit at the end.
Cold calling: three a week, not thirty a month
Take on three new addresses a week and build them into tours you drive anyway. Over roughly 46 working weeks that makes about 140 first contacts a year. A separate prospecting day, by contrast, gets pushed from one week to the next.
Cold calling rarely fails on the approach. It almost always fails on regularity. In the conversation itself, two things make the difference: you know why you are standing in this particular business. And you ask for the next step, not for the order. “May I come back in four weeks and show you what this looks like for a business your size?” is a question people can say yes to.
New customers only get a class after three visits
A new customer looks bigger at the start than they turn out to be. Put them straight on a two-week cycle and a year later you have no time left for your A customers.
Visit them three times at short intervals, then grade them honestly. How the classes work is in the guide Sales territory planning.
You write the note in the car, not in the evening
Write the note straight after the visit, in the car, before you start the engine. You still know who was in the room and what they said. At 21:00 you can no longer say whether the question about delivery times at visit four came from the buyer or from the boss.
A note you do not write is a forgotten visit eight weeks later. What belongs in it is in the guide Call reports in field sales.
A phone call is half a visit
Use the phone for following up and for C customers at the edge of the territory. If you only ever phone an important customer, you notice the mistake as soon as a competitor has been there in person.
Rule of thumb: for following up, a call is enough. For a decision, drive there.
Staying overnight is often better than driving home
Work it out once for a destination two and a half hours from home. Without an overnight stay: two day trips, five hours of driving each, four visits each. That is ten hours on the road for eight visits. With an overnight stay: you drive there and back once, five hours in all, and fit five visits into each of the two days. That is five hours on the road for ten visits.
When it pays off and how to lay out the two days is in the guide Overnight or drive home.
What belongs in the company system and what is your own note
Separate what the company needs from your personal working notes. Numbers you report come back: as a target, as a comparison, as a question in the quarterly review. That is no reason to report less. It is a reason to keep the two apart.
Visit numbers and results belong in the company system. Your note that the buyer retires in June stays with you.
Four sales tips you can skip
Not every piece of advice from the sales seminar survives contact with the territory.
“See as many customers as possible.” Twelve short visits to C customers look good and move nothing. Four visits to A customers who are due move something.
“Just drop in when you are nearby.” Being nearby is not a reason. Being due is. A visit without a reason is a wasted visit, and next time you have no reason to come.
“Build a personal relationship, the rest follows by itself.” Half true. Being liked opens the door, but you win the order by solving a problem. If you only look after the relationship, you are well liked and you get no orders.
“Do your reports at the weekend.” What you write from memory on Saturday is fiction with a date on it.
How trakki does it
trakki takes over what you would otherwise have to keep in your head. You set how often a customer is due, say every 60 days, and the traffic light shows who is overdue. On the map you see which customers are close together. Opening hours, lunch closure included, are stored with the customer, and the weekly plan keeps to them. When a slot frees up, trakki suggests customers nearby, and a customer you visited in vain stays due.
You type the visit note or dictate it: on the iPhone with the button in the app, on an Android phone with your keyboard's microphone. Your customer list is stored on your device, and you need no trakki account. trakki is coming to iPhone and Android. In the browser you can look at trakki with sample customers, on the home page.
Frequently asked questions
How many visits can you make in a day in field sales?
Six on a normal day with drive times across a territory, eight in a dense city, three to four when the journeys run over an hour. Anyone who keeps planning for more is planning to fall behind.
How do I start in a new territory?
Put the customer list on the map first. Then visit every A customer once in person during the first four weeks. After that, check how your predecessor graded the customers. After six months the territory looks different from day one, and that is how it should be.
Is cold calling in field sales still worth it?
Yes, as long as it runs alongside the normal week. Three addresses a week on tours you drive anyway cost hardly any time. A separate prospecting day costs a whole day and is the first thing cut when things get tight.