Simplify Your Sales Route Planning with Dynamics 365 Map

Proper sales route planning can help you win customers and, ultimately, achieve your goals! To some, this concept may sound painless. However, several complex layers surround it, making it one of the most challenging chores for sales managers! 

That is one reason businesses seek tools like Dynamics 365 Map – to simplify route planning. The mapping plugin for Dynamics CRM makes sales route planning a breeze for teams and ensures great results. Put simply, route sales planning connects sales reps with valuable clients and closes high-yielding deals. 

Let’s learn more about this planning process and see how using the right mapping plugin for CRM, you can streamline it! In addition, with a tool like Dynamics 365 Map, your sales team can make the most of their on-field operations. 

What is Sales Route Planning? 

Sales route planning is planning sales meetings or customer appointments in a ‘logical order.’ This process involves finding the most efficient way for a sales rep to get from customer A to customer B. The primary goal of the entire process is to minimize the cost and time of on-field sales efforts. 

In addition, the process helps maximize customer satisfaction by finding the quickest route to reach all the customers in the pipeline. Well, this process isn’t entirely as uncomplicated as it sounds. Several factors affect route planning and optimization. For instance, distance and time, availability of resources, traffic conditions, etc., are just a handful of factors that impact the routing. 

Let’s analyze the benefits of proper sales route planning, some common challenges salespeople face, and how Dynamics 365 Map solves them. 

What Are the Benefits of Having a Sales Route Plan?

A well-optimized route plan allows businesses to make the most of their existing time and resources! Manually creating a route plan takes a lot of work. Moreover, to execute the planned route in reality, you need more than just the locations of your customers, scheduled appointments, and a map of the area.  

 Yes, you guessed that right! You need an advanced and well-developed route planning tool! 

Not having a strategic sales route plan comes with a lot of challenges, including:

• Unrealistic real-time decision-making 
• Working with outdated tools
• Wasting time on the job because of inaccurate or outdated information
• Missed opportunities 
• Poor understanding of sales territories

These challenges can pop up if you don’t have the most suitable route-planning process. But what would happen if you figured out how to create these route plans correctly? 

Let’s take a look. 

• Steep increase in sales productivity 

An effective route plan will eliminate unnecessary travel time for your sales reps, ensuring they seamlessly cover all their scheduled appointments ‘on time.’ Moreover, when the reps reach their meetings on time, they can engage more with the customers and provide a more personalized experience.  

A better focus on core responsibilities will lead to higher revenue generation and conversion rates for the business. Furthermore, the absence of such unnecessary route-related stress will allow your resources to perform more effectively on the field without feeling exhausted!  

• Improved territory management 

Sales route planning not only helps you create a strategic route but also helps you cover territories more effectively. How? The tool ensures that every customer can receive personalized, one-on-one appointments! This way, you can prevent any gaps in reaching out to customers, leaving you with unsatisfactory client engagement ratios. 

In addition, route planning will help distribute sales efforts evenly across the territories you are willing to cover. It will also easily increase customer conversion, retention rates, and comprehensive market penetration. 

• Efficient time and cost management 

When it comes to managing sales operations, both time and cost play important roles. Strategically planning and optimizing the routes will ensure that you save time and money on every appointment.

Put simply, your sales representatives will be able to visit more customers within a specific period. Moreover, by reducing the time representatives spend on the road, you can save fuel and vehicle maintenance costs. 

How Dynamics 365 Map Solves Sales Route Planning Challenges 

Now that you know what challenges you might encounter during the route planning process, let’s find out how Dynamics 365 Map can solve them. 

• Eliminates manual route planning 

Sales routing is unquestionably time-consuming. If done manually, creating just one route can take you forever. However, MappyField 365 can complete this task more easily and literally within seconds!  

The system automatically considers dynamic factors like traffic conditions, meeting durations, etc., to generate the best possible routes. Your sales reps only need to follow these routes to get the most out of their daily 1:1 appointments with customers. 

In simpler words, Dynamics 365 Map stamps out the manual labor involved in using spreadsheets to find customer addresses, create the route, assume the time estimates, etc.

• Improves visibility of sales rep’s efforts 

Often, sales managers find it difficult to see or measure the actual effort input by a sales representative. However, with a smart sales route planning, optimization, and management tool like Dynamics 365 Map, sales managers can easily view the rep’s off/on-field activities. 

Managers can get real-time locations of the sales reps, view the check-in and check-out times, see the upcoming appointments, etc. 

• Streamlines appointment-related information in the CRM 

Another issue that sales teams face is wasting time looking for updated information about a specific appointment. However, with Dynamics 365 Map’s latest feature, sales reps can record notes directly in the CRM and attach important files and images to support their notes. 

The feature ensures that the entire sales team, C-suite, and managers can access the notes and make informed decisions quickly. 

• Quick communication

Dynamics 365 Map helps managers, on-field teams, and sales representatives connect instantly. How? 

Using the in-app live chat feature, they can quickly communicate, share valuable insights, and even make mutual decisions on the go! 

What Else Can Dynamics 365 Map Do? 

Apart from creating efficient routes and optimizing them, the advanced mapping plugin for Dynamics 365 can help you with: 

• Plotting related records on the map

The latest feature of Dynamics 365 Map lets you plot and see all the related records of accounts on the map. For example, if you have related contacts and cases to accounts, you can easily plot them on the map without fetching the same information on the CRM. 

Moreover, the plugin will display the related records with color-coded pushpins, making it easier to identify them at a glance. 

• Import and plot external data  

The Dynamics 365 Map further eliminates manual data entry tasks! Using the new feature, you can import external data in a CSV file and plot it on the map. This amazing feature eliminates the need to enter the data into the CRM and plot it on the map. 

Besides, the external data can also be imported into the CRM. Therefore, you won’t have to worry about documenting it again in the system! 

• Improves data visualization 

The advanced mapping plugin helps you plan and optimize routes and enables you to visualize the data more simply. 

With the latest feature, you can configure different pushpin colors for each field value. This feature will let you or anyone else identify complex fields and accounts on the map and help streamline the geospatial analysis. 

• Integration with other apps 

Dynamics 365 Map, the advanced mapping plugin, integrates well with CRM and other navigation apps, such as Bing Maps and Google Maps. 

It helps sales reps and managers get real-time updates and follow the route plan more seamlessly. 

• Multi-platform accessibility

The route planning tool Dynamics 365 Map is readily available on various platforms, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones!

This compatibility with an array of devices lets the sales team view and keep tabs on all operations, planned routes, and appointments at all times. 

Final Words 

According to a study by ClickFunnels, sales reps spend only 35.2% of their time ‘selling.’ The remaining 64.8% of their time on the job is spent on other non-revenue-generating tasks, including handling CRM. A Forbes article says that if reps get to manage their time on the job actively, they can spend 18.9% more of their time selling the product. 

Using Dynamics 365 Map, one can easily leverage benefits such as spending more time with valuable customers. Additionally, you will experience higher productivity on the field, less travel time and cost, and better resource utilization. 

These statistical figures and benefits show how important it is for businesses to choose the right sales route planning software. So, if you still think you don’t need a route planning or mapping tool for Dynamics CRM, think again!