The Business Need
A large, global manufacturer of building materials and aggregate needed an easy- to- use application for the field sales teams, helping them plan and schedule their field visits efficiently and ensuring market coverage. The customer was using Salesforce as their CRM.
The challenge was to customise the planning, considering the territory and route being visited. The client wished to provide intelligent recommendations to help the sales team prioritise accounts they needed to visit. It also made it easier for them to quickly plan visits.
Solution
A very elegant and easy- to- use solution was built that included the following features:
- Territory-wise expectations of visits per day
- Ability to plan for non-field activity and leave
- Ability to create plan-templates and clone-visit plans
- Ability configure weekly or monthly visits as needed, enabling plan approvals
- Drag drop-calendar interface to easily plan and view the summary of their plan
- Intelligent recommendations on accounts to add or drop, based on account category and history of previous visits. Also, color coding of accounts based on recommendations
- Visits were created as calendar events to serve as quick, daily reference to the sales team
Outcomes
- Adoption of Salesforce increased significantly
- Improved market coverage by over 30%
- Increased customer satisfaction due to effective coverage of market