Field Use Case - Multi-Day Routing Training Video

Overview of our Multiday routing product and key functionality for a Field Use Case.

 

Hello and welcome to our training video which will give you an overview our Multiday routing product and key functionality for a Field Use Case.

What is Multiday Routing? 

Multiday routing is a field sales optimization tool that boosts sales productivity by allowing you to:  

1. Plan up to 20 days of routes at once:
   • Create multi-day schedules and plan up 20 days of routes at once 
2. Automatically optimize your routes:
   • Create automatically optimized routes to save you time on the road and allow you to visit more clients 
3. Prioritize accounts to visit
   
   • Prioritize your shortlist of clients to visit based on criteria you set using our recommendations index.  
   • for example high value, or least recently visited accounts 
4. Build routes around your client’s availability 
   • You can build your routes around your client's availability and account for those only available on certain days of the week or during certain times in the day 
5. Build routes around your availability 
   • You can also build your routes around your availability by setting start and finish times, break times, stop over times, and your office days 
6. Build routes around confirmed meetings  
   • Finally, you can lock any confirmed meetings into your schedule and build your routes around these confirmed meetings.  

Multi-Day Routing Benefits 

Optimize your routes  

• Multiday routing allows you to create optimized and efficient routes for your trips.  
• We use intelligent algorithms to select the optimum stop order and save you time on the road.    

Maximize selling time  

• Multiday routing allows you to visit more clients and spend more time with your clients as it allows reps to identify the fastest way to get from one account to the other. 

Reduce inefficiencies in your Sales process  

• We use intelligent algorithms to calculate smarter schedules thereby reducing inefficiencies in your sales process.  
• For example, sales reps could be spending time driving from 1 account to another and passing 3 accounts on the way. Multiday routing reduces such inefficiencies in your planning process.   

Spend less time planning and driving  

• Within a few minutes you can have efficient routes planned for the next month with Multiday routing. 
  
  

Creating a Route: 

Let’s say for example you are traveling to New Jersey for 5 days and while there, you want to make the best use of your time and visit clients and leads in the area. 

We can start creating our multiday route by selecting the + routes tab to the top right-hand side of the screen and select Create Routes from current map. 

Setting your/Rep availability 

• You can Start by setting your or your reps availability by selecting the settings button. 
  

• Set your start and end dates (you can plan up to 20 days in advance).   

• Set your start and finish times. In this instance, the working day is 9 am to 5.30 pm.   

• Next, select your appointment duration time which is how long you’ll spend with each client. If you don't have an exact number, you can use an estimate.  You can also set Custom stop times offering you enhanced flexibility as you can input variable stop times. For example, allocate 5 minutes to new leads for a quick intro and drop-in business card, and allocate an hour to your most important account. Once you include this information in your data, we can build your schedule around this.   

• You can also include your break time, select your preferred routing approach, whether it is one-way or return, and add your start and end locations, your travel mode and travel days where you can choose to not travel on a day if you would like to set this aside to catch up on admin, book appointments or make calls. 

• Once you are happy with your settings you can select done. 

Refine your shortlist. 

The shortlist is the list of accounts that are going to make up your schedule. The easiest and quickest way to refine your shortlist is to use filters and buffers. 

• First I can use a drive time buffer to filter my data to locations within 20 minutes of my start location, I will then further filter our data to accounts with a value over 400. We can do this by going to the filter tab in our control panel to the left-hand side of our map and selecting add filter. 

• In the attribute dropdown select the column you wish to filter by and then input your filter values. 
  
• Now that our data is filtered down we can add individual points to the shortlist by clicking on them and selecting the shortlist option or I can add multiple points using the multi-add option. 

• You will see any points added to your shortlist listed in the left-hand side of the routing panel. Some info about the shortlist is available to the right, this example shows the sales value for each stop. You can sort these from high to low. You can change the fields that are displayed here by selecting this icon and choosing the fields you want displayed. 
  

Create schedule 

• To create your schedule, click the Create Routes button 
  • We can now see our optimized route for the week. 
  • The map and routes are colour-coded by day so you can clearly see which stops are associated with which day. 
  • The gaps between stops indicate the travel time between stops. 
  • We can also see that the breaks are at different times on different days to allow for the most optimum route. 

• You can see a summary of your route by selecting the date heading to the top of each day. 

1. Customers Availability 

• So far, we have concentrated on our reps/driver’s availability. But what about your client? What if they can only meet you in a certain window? Or what if you have a meeting confirmed with a key account?
• We regularly hear of our customer’s reps, booking meetings with their key customers, and then generating their schedules around these confirmed meetings.   
• With Multiday routing you can lock in confirmed meetings by dragging and dropping them into the set time and day on the routing calendar. 

• You can also set the availability for a client by clicking on the client in the shortlist and choosing the Set Availability option. 
• Or your customer’s availability can be imported into eSpatial if it exists in your data by opening your settings window and selecting view dataset availability windows. 

 

1. Recommendations 

• Our recommendations index allows you to tell eSpatial how to prioritise your stops based on numeric or date values allowing you can prioritise stops based on things like sales potential, sales value or last visited etc.   

• This is useful when we have a large area to cover or only a short period of time to visit as many clients as possible 

• We are going to clear this schedule, and shortlist and change our settings to make it a 3-day route. 

• Now we are going to set up my recommendation index. This is where you choose the parameters around what stops to prioritize, so either on a number field from high to low or low to high or on a date field like when the client was last visited. 
• To add recommended stops to the shortlist, select recommendations from the drop-down.  

• Select the gear icon to edit your recommendation criteria and select complete to save your changes: 

• We are going to add 40 of our accounts to our shortlist using the recommendations option in the dropdown. 

• Finally, we will create the schedule 

• Only 36 of the 40 recommended stops were added to the schedule over the 3 days, the remaining 4 were most likely not added due to insufficient availability to service all stops.  

Exporting & Sharing 

• Now that we have shown you how easy it is to create an optimised schedule around your seller and customer’s availability, let’s take a look at some of the output and sharing options.   
  • You can of course share the route with other users on your eSpatial account  
• They will have a live interactive version of the route, and be able to update any fields on the stops once you provide edit permissions when sharing 

• There are also a couple of export options  
  • Such as Calendar – where you can Export an iCS calendar file that is supported by the primary calendars such as outlook and google. The calendar items include links to Waze, Google Maps and Apple Maps, so from your calendar you can get live directions to each stop from your mobile device. 
  • CSV – Export to a spreadsheet so you have an ordered set of stops. This also includes Waze, Google Maps and Apple Maps links.   
  • And finally Image – you can export your route as a PNG image too if you like 

Mobile Application: 

The mobile application is the perfect companion app to our Multiday routing product for Field Sales and Service reps who are looking to get more from their day, spending less time travelling and more time with the people that count, your customers.    

The Mobile App has been designed around the key activities, or Jobs-To-Be-Done of field sales and service reps. 

You can learn more about our mobile app by viewing our mobile app help videos here. 

Conclusion: 

Thank you for watching our training video on creating multiday routes within eSpatial. If you have any questions, you can contact us by emailing help@espatial.com or by selecting the chat button to the bottom left-hand corner of your screen when on our website or logged into eSpatial. You can also visit our video resources page to view other helpful videos.