Field sales reps spend about 20% of their week on the road – some of them even more. That’s at least one day a week spent driving! Don’t confuse drive time with ‘lost time’, however. Here’s 6 ways to ensure time on the road is productive and contributing to sales success.
It’s easy to focus only on the time you spend in conversation with customers as important to the sale. In your commitment to the customer, it’s easy to forget about peripheral factors that are as crucial to your functioning and sales success.
What happens in your car before or between visits can have as big an impact on your customer visits as your preparations for those conversations. In fact, it has a definite impact on the success of those visits. How does getting lost or encountering a road closure on the way to a customer affect the conversation? What if you just had a great meeting with a prospect but no time to take proper visit notes, or a terrible meeting and still struggling to process it all? You’re all too aware of your phone battery running a bit low and a bit worried about your connection that keeps dropping in the area you’re now driving in. Moreover, you’re hungry and slightly dehydrated but don’t have time to stop for a quick bite.
It sounds like the perfect storm – or lack of preparation – but we’ve all had those days. They happen. Even when just one of these things goes wrong, we become frustrated and our waiting customer by now is possibly irritated. It’s not the way we want to be selling. Thankfully, it’s not the way we have to.
Given the nature of your job, your car is your most important space. Time on the road provides the perfect opportunity to de-stress and recharge between customer visits. It’s your office on wheels. With the right tools it’s a place where you can seamlessly continue to complete your daily admin tasks, plan ahead and sharpen your skills. That’s why we suggest 5 ways to turn your car into the ideal rep-mobile:
