Let’s face it, for many of you, it’s been awhile since you’ve traveled to visit a customer. While you may have mastered the art of efficient business travel before the pandemic, you’ve been out of practice lately (some for over a year and a half).
So the idea of traveling again is going to take some getting used to.
As you return to business trips in 2021, you’ll probably run into bumps in the road that you used to know to watch out for, but have since forgotten.
Of course, you can try to plan and schedule every detail beforehand, but that takes away your time for selling – especially when you have to plan for multiple recurring visits. It’s quite the dilemma.
This problem is precisely what Geopointe’s Route Planner add-on was created to solve.
An automated solution like Route Planner saves all the planning time for people like you who need to be out in the field selling, not sitting at a desk trying to plan a trip.
What is Route Planner?
If you aren’t familiar with Route Planner, here’s a crash course. Route Planner automates the process of route planning. You can create optimized route plans days, weeks, or months in advance for those recurring, scheduled visits to your accounts.
Ideal for sales and service professionals who make these repetitive trips, it helps you maximize your visits per day so you can be sure you’re getting the most out of your time traveling. High-volume sales, account management and service teams can organize travel and visits to maximize coverage and optimize productivity.
Some of the key capabilities of Route Planner include:
- Automatically generate optimized routes up to months in advance
- Plan routes with specific meeting lengths
- Share routes with other team members
- Optimize your routes for maximum efficiency
- Access routes on the go from mobile devices, as well as desktops when needed
- Import routes into your calendar so your schedule is easy to follow
Route Planner will automatically create an optimized route schedule using the parameters you set so you don’t have to do any of the scheduling.
What Can Route Planner Do?
Wouldn’t it be great if Geopointe could just tell you where to go and when? Imagine if you could simply click a button and have the next several weeks intelligently scheduled for you. How much time would that save?
Well, that’s exactly what Route Planner does – it saves you (a lot of) time normally spent planning.
So what exactly can you do with Route Planner?
- Build a trip around a big meeting with an important customer.
- Fill in meeting cancellations with nearby accounts to avoid wasted time between visits.
- Plan, optimize, save & share multipoint travel routes.
- Check-in and check-out to document arrival & departure info and log meeting notes on the go.
For Geopointe’s Route Planner, route planning isn’t simply finding a path between two different locations. It’s about finding the most efficient path from point A to point B, adding it to a schedule at the most optimum time, and guiding you to each location. Add to that the flexibility to fill in meeting cancellations, and you’ve got Route Planner.
Common Use Cases
Route Planner is best used for things that need to happen on a schedule, & that you need to be sure are happening regularly. Each industry is different, so their use cases vary, but the following are a few examples of how our customers use Geopointe’s Route Planner.
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
CPG field teams have a lot of accounts to hit and not a lot of time to hit them. Route Planner enables managers overseeing large CPG field teams to assess territories and automatically schedule out months of optimized routes within a set daily timeframe (i.e. 8 AM and 5 PM). This way, they can cover far more ground with a more efficient route process.
Industrial Manufacturing
Geopointe’s Route Planner gives sales reps in the industrial manufacturing industry the ability to schedule out meeting cadences (i.e. one visit per month) with high-end clients to develop the type of rapport that builds trust over time.
Medical Devices & Pharmaceuticals
Sales reps selling medical technology are often working with customers located near one another, so field routes are much more efficient when properly planned out. Geopointe’s Route Planner allows managers to build a route plan that pre-determines how frequently they want their teams to visit them (i.e. once per quarter).
Home Health Care Providers
Route Planner allows service providers in the home health care space to create custom route plans for specific health conditions, so that providers have an automated visit schedule with an appropriate visit frequency (for example, three times per week) for the patient’s condition.
Financial Services
With Route Planner, financial professionals can now create a custom meeting schedule that adheres to the specific cadences (for example, once at the end of every quarter) and needs (i.e. pre-planning for high-seasons) of every business model they serve.
Government Agencies
Geopointe’s Route Planner helps government officials address time-sensitive needs with automated route schedules that adhere to the specific criteria of each case they cover. For example, if a business needs three building code approvals in a two-month time-frame, you can generate a route schedule that follows with those specific approval needs.
More Intelligent Route Planning
When you travel to visit an account, there’s a lot to think about, so imagine how much less stressful it would be if you had everything planned (automatically) in advance to be as efficient as possible.
Routing in general is central to Geopointe, but Route Planner takes you to the next level. With Route Planner, you can schedule out days, weeks, or even months in advance.
The best part? The system will reevaluate the most efficient route and schedule as you go, so if the route you took last month included an account that you no longer need to visit, Route Planner will create a different route that organizes your stops more efficiently.
So the question is: can you afford not to use Geopointe’s Route Planner?
