Preparation matters. Planning matters.
SENRI understands the importance of sales planning, and here’s why. If you have encountered the following situations before, it would be beneficial to read this article.
Sales managers strive to achieve sales targets and desire their sales staff to visit more customers each day. However, simply repeating this request does not necessarily increase the number of customer visits. Moreover, even if the sales staff manages to increase the number of visits, it does not guarantee increased sales if the visits do not align with business cycles or if they are concentrated on specific customers instead of evenly distributed across all active customers. SENRI’s concepts address these business issues through scheduling and visit cycle monitoring.
Have you tried using calendar applications or project management tools, only to find them ineffective?
If you are considering implementing schedule management, you may initially think of using calendar applications like Google Calendar. While this may be suitable for managing your own schedule in the office, managing sales staff requires a different approach. Here’s why:
- Some sales staff may not need to manage their appointment times.
- Sales managers may prefer to minimise changes to plans, which may not be possible with calendar applications.
- Sales managers want to receive reports, which is beyond the capabilities of calendar applications.
- Calendar applications do not ensure proper achievement of plans.
SENRI’s schedule summary provides basic methods to address these challenges:
- SENRI generates reports on plans, results, and their comparison for managers. We also offer weekly/daily email notifications to managers.
- We provide numerous customisable settings that help managers establish discipline and easily manage plans, such as setting minimum plan requirements and restricting the editing of plans or unplanned visits.
- SENRI supports various types of schedule management based on the organisation’s needs. Some clients have sales staff input plans for the previous week, which managers review and monitor progress. In other cases, managers input repetitive weekly plans, and field staff simply follow the designated routes.
In addition to these basic methods, SENRI offers advanced schedule functions:
- SENRI enables the management of visit objectives. Both sales staff and managers can select objectives such as merchandising, sales, delivery, etc. SENRI automatically verifies whether the planned objectives are achieved or not.
- We incorporate machine learning AI to recommend visits based on past visit records, ensuring customers are not forgotten and business cycles are maintained properly.
Impact to sales team:
Let’s take a success story from a pharmaceutical company in Nigeria as an example:
The company set a daily minimum of 25 plans by the end of the second quarter. Staff members are not allowed to start their day unless they have made 25 plans. As a result, the average daily number of visits increased by 25% from the second quarter to the third quarter.
*Note: “2Q” refers to the second quarter.
Good planning and preparation are often the keys to success. Don’t hesitate to reach out to the SENRI team to learn more!