For a business to operate smoothly, it requires the efforts of both retail store employees and sales or field force employees. Similarly for banks, PoS, Insurance, Telecom and a whole range of businesses, field service agents play a crucial role in attending to customer needs, queries and service related issues. When these field sales agents step out of the stores/offices to make daily clients visits, be sold and a pethey are under immense pressure to achieve their weekly/monthly or annual sales targets. The vast geographical areas to be covered, uncertain climatic conditions and unavailability of public transports at their designated routes puts a lot of mental pressure on the field workforce. This constant stress doesn’t allow them to take correct decisions & make optimal route plants, thereby reducing their working efficiency and increasing stress. Such things in a long run may poorly affect business sales and prevent sales teams from achieving annual targets. In order to overcome this gremlin, an effective beat plan or a personal journey plan is very important.
What is beat plan and how it resolves our problem?
Even after providing the best of the resources and a good team to back on, the sales force somewhere ineptly miss out on achieving their goals.
A beat plan or a personal journey plan(PJP) is something that includes the daily targeted tasks and an optimized route to complete them. This plan is assigned to each field agent so that they have a clear vision of their daily routine tasks. They get to know the route to follow to their next client and be in synchronization with their fellow team members. Nearest business outlet is also mentioned in the plan, so that if they run out of products they can reach directly to the store or connect with nearest team member for a restock.
They can also set daily journey plan for themselves and get it approved from their manager. This way their efforts don’t go in vain and a lot of time can be saved which will not only improve their work efficiency but also good revenue scores can be generated for business growth.
There must be designed certain curated plans so that no two employees may visit the same sales area. Many such points must be kept in mind before developing a beat plan for field employees. Manually creating the work plan for individual employee is extremely tiresome and leads to a lot of confusion and errors. Even if the plan is made, following up each one of them is a herculean task. Managers would end up spending their productive hours with this endless pileup and won’t be able to focus on boosting sales and team productivity. Instead of planning it manually, companies now go in for new-age automated workforce management solutions. And when we talk about an effective sales force management solution, Imprint is the one that can be trusted for its rich array of user friendly field force management features. It can help in figuring out an effective beat plan for field agents and also makes sure that they follow it anyway. Before working out on any beat plan, the following points should be considered:
1) The sales region must be distributed among the field agents appropriately. Based on the size of the store, demand of a particular item in a specific region, areas can be divided and no field agent should breach each other’s region.
2)Factors like competency and experience of the field agents must be considered. Like larger regions can be allocated to field agents with better past performance. Considering the past experience of agents, they may be allotted the areas where they had strong social or friendly connections. With the workforce automation solution, Imprint ,this complicated distribution considering the most minute factors becomes possible. The geotag feature allows managers/agents to locate the client sites on map. This helps the individual employee to locate their visit area.
3) Since areas have been assigned, an efficient route map must also be generated. Optimized route planning cuts down time & fuels consumption and results in better productivity. Imprint ensures that field agents visit their designated territories. If they breaches the geo-fence, a prompt alert will be generated and manager will be informed about it.
Apart from building up a beat plan for individual employees, some of the common mistakes like overburdening the employee, giving more targets than capacity must also be avoided. With Imprint’s attendance management, working hours and time spent on each client site, must be speculated and throughput of each employee must be analyzed. And if any employees are found unproductive, they must be pushed to work better by providing special training sessions.
An effective beat plan promptly guides field employees to carry out daily routine sales tasks with high efficiency levels. However, along with successful creation of a beat plan, IMPRINT workforce management software has many more aces up its sleeve. Live location tracking of employees, alert generation on path deviation, route guidance, nearby client alert generation, automated attendance management, reports generation are some of its unmatched features.
A personal journey plan (PJP) is definitely going to boost a business’ productivity and efficiency. With a proper PJP, field agents stay guided and more focused on their targets. On the other hand, managers and administrative staff can get rid of all unnecessary paper work and time wastage. To know how Imprint helped a leading POS company to improve their customer service and workforce efficiency, check this out.
