Do your drivers have difficulty keeping route and customer data organised? Does this lead to costly disruptions and delays along the route?
Paper-based systems can slow down your team’s performance; drivers have to spend a lot of time making calls to the admin team, making queries related to payments, credits, and special offers for the customers, and reporting delays. These delays aren’t resolved as quickly as they could be, causing route delays that result in wrong orders or missed ETAs.
Delays in communication, largely caused by manual or disparate systems, have a few key impacts on the productivity of delivery businesses:
Digital software is being used more and more by delivery businesses to make life easier for teams, improve their productivity, and ultimately, drive sales and growth. They help to simplify processes throughout the delivery cycle, minimising disruptions, cutting admin time and improving visibility.
We’ve come up with various ways that the right digital system can improve the productivity of your teams.
Van Sale Operations are successful because of the level of service they provide to their customers. This begins with consistent daily or weekly visits that meet SLAs and the customer can rely on.
Being inconsistent in deliveries or not-making the right sales offers to customers impacts reputation, customer relationships, and profits.
Delivery management systems can hold schedules for each customer and generate daily call plans. They help teams to track driver progress—meaning you don’t need to micro-manage. At the customer’s premises, the rep will have the full sales history and any promotions linked to that customer, and this knowledge helps the rep maximise every sales call. With better knowledge and automated invoicing, the reps are able to spend their time selling to each and every customer—introducing new ranges, prompting the customer with products, and closing distribution gaps.
Your office staff are easy to manage if you're able to see where they are and what they do. Your sales reps and delivery drivers are much harder to monitor.
Businesses are often unaware of real-time information on their deliveries, lacking visibility into what’s happening in the field. This means admin teams have to wait until the end of the day to receive and process reports, resulting in a lot of waiting time and additional costs that could be avoided.
With route planning and monitoring systems like RouteMagic, you’ll have a live view of their progress and performance with instant updates after every sale, payment, and delivery. As soon as a rep completes a report (vehicle inspection, inventory update, POD, order adjustment), the office teams will have access to them, massively improving processing speed and the overall cash cycle. Live-tracking and geo-fencing ensure your team are on the correct territory and allow you to monitor delays and changes to the plan, improving responsiveness.
As a result, the team is more productive, and customers appreciate the level of service and communication you provide.
Managing customer payments places heavy burdens on many businesses; they need accurate invoicing and strong credit control processes to make sure each rep knows which customers need to pay and how much.
Modern software helps you manage your payments and control credit seamlessly removing the need to manually manage the entire process. Your drivers and reps are prompted for payment information, and delivery apps can help drivers handle any payment types and log them directly into the main system. . These delivery apps also ensure security control, with all payments accurately recorded in both mobile and office applications, and a full cash ledger ensures no money is lost. Reports and payments are processed quicker, and automatic calculations avoid manual error and duplication of effort.
RouteMagic is an end-to-end solution for Van Sales and Direct-to-Store (DSD) operators that has been built to meet real-life issues faced by businesses today. No longer will you need to rekey every sale into your office systems—sales and payments processed by your reps will update the office systems instantly—saving hours of admin resources, and giving you real-time information on how each day’s sales are progressing.
Having synchronised office and mobile apps is a fundamental feature of digital mobile sales systems, where data is shared between mobile and office teams, eliminating the need for rekeying records and transactions. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. As well as avoiding the need to rekey, digital systems ensure that both office and mobile staff see and use the same information; examples include customer details, credit rules, or different products and pricing structures. Sales invoices will always be priced correctly, and anomalies can easily be detected, ensuring every customer is correctly invoiced and receives their invoices swiftly, helping to reduce the invoice to payment cycle.
This is the first in a series of articles on optimising van sales performance, that aims to show you how you can improve van sales management with RouteMagic’s technical prowess, for business growth.
Once your mobile and office workforce are synchronized, you need to focus on recommendations that the van sales drivers will make to your customers. Read this blog to understand how powerful this sales technique is and what you can achieve by optimising it.
RouteMagic has been around for over 20 years now, providing solutions for a range of industries, sectors, and business models. We support over 100 customers and thousands of daily users, continuously improving our software to alleviate a range of challenges.
