Help Your Field Sales Team Spend Their Time More Productively
How should selling time be divided between existing customers and new leads? If too little time is spent with existing customers, long-term contracts will be lost. If not enough time is invested in building relations with new leads, not enough new business will be generated.
Catch-22 Paradox
Balancing selling time is a classic Catch-22 paradox; If you take great care of existing customers, it’s hard to find time with new leads. If you only chase new deals, you will lose existing customers.
Balance Sales Time
One method to combat this is simply putting in extra hours — doing more of both farming and hunting — however this is not sustainable. Instead, learn from successful sales professionals who are very effective in how they geographically manage their sales territories.
Avoid the Wild Goose Chase
Over the years, we’ve witnessed how certain sales people focused on a fairly small area of their existing sales territory. They build up relationships with potential customers in their own backyard. On the flip side, we have seen sales reps covering large territories, driving great distances in the process. Can you guess which type of sales professional is capable of building the most sustainable business for themselves?
Lead in Salesforce.com complete with the closest sales rep and service rep, plus approximate Drive Time in minutes:
The Marketing Campaign That Fizzled
We have all seen it before: The marketing team runs a great campaign and creates warm leads for the sales team. The sales team is excited and starts visiting the new leads. But after a few weeks, few of the once-warm leads are getting closer to a close.
Marketing Sending Sales out on Field Trips
Let’s say a marketing campaign generated 20 leads across a sales territory. The sales rep is excited and starts calling the leads and books 5 visits. The first visit turns out to be a 45 minutes drive and the second is a 2.5 hour field trip. The second lead just made our sales person spend almost a whole day of valuable selling time driving instead. From that point, the interest in pursuing more leads usually diminishes significantly.
Run Successful Marketing Campaigns Based on Drive Time
Fortunately, it’s now possible for marketing and sales to coordinate campaigns and lead follow-up in a much better way. By automatically adding the Drive Time between each sales representative and their respective leads in Salesforce, the Marketing team can drastically improve their targeted marketing campaigns.
Salesforce Report with 15,312 Leads Divided by Drive Time Zones
The report below is from Salesforce.com. All leads are automatically put into “Drive Time Zones”. The marketing team intensifies their campaigns in the areas closest to each sales person:
The Benefits of Drive Time Zones in Salesforce.Com Are Compelling:
Marketing can deliver highly targeted leads to the sales team.
Sales can reach more leads and build relations faster.
Customers are better serviced by having their sales rep close by.
Save the Sales Team Thousands of Hours in Drive Time
The people behind the Salesforce app RealZips.com spent years making Drive Time in Salesforce.com possible. Fortunately, your whole team can now take advantage of this new technology within days.