Here we go – the route planning project for your field sales force is about to start. In this article you will find information on how to prepare your customer data so that your project is a complete success right from the start. Take a look at these additional valuable tips on the successful introduction of portatour®.

The routes  generated by portatour® can only be as good as the data you import. If you do a good job here, you will benefit from the word go and your colleagues will be happy to work with portatour®. This means that the right customers are visited, no customer is ever forgotten, more customer visits per day are achieved and less time is spent in the car.

Continue reading →

Does the works council of your company ask questions about portatour®, and are you unsure regarding any of the points it brings up? Read on for assistance with frequently asked questions from the works council.

portatour® is first and foremost a tool for field service staff. Automatic route planning immensely simplifies daily work in field service. This is because daily work with portatour® means:

• Less effort for route planning: one push of a button does the trick!
• Support in achieving goals (number of visits, turnover,…)
• Better visibility of territory and customers
• More time for customer visits
• Less mileage on the road
• More free time in the evening and/or weekend

Continue reading →

Are you wondering how you can use your existing data in portatour® for route planning? The following article spells out the various interfaces and functions that you can use to import and export your data to and from portatour®. Continue reading →

Are you a sales manager or responsible for managing your company’s field service?  Do you want to gain effective and efficient oversight of your team? Do you want to know at any given time what’s happening outside in the field?

With a portatour® Company Account, you get a professional sales oversight tool and can thus implement your sales strategy consistently. As management, you define the goals of sales calls, create guidelines for the structure and scope of call reports, and determine the rules for accessing customer data.

Read on to find out more on how to reach your goals with a portatour® Route Planner Company Account.

Continue reading →

A constant matter of dispute in customer relationship management is the question if customer calls should be prescheduled or not…

Of course there is no universally valid answer. Below you may find arguments for and against scheduled appointments with customers, which are to be considered when deciding on the right approach for your business.

Continue reading →

In this guideline we have summarized the important aspects of “appointments with customers” for field reps and give you some advice to take along for your B2B customer calls.

Why?

If a pre-scheduled appointment is reasonalbe for field reps or not depends on various factors like the sector, the planned duration of the appointment, the number of customer calls per day, etc. Please read our article “Pre-schedule customer appointments – STOP or GO for a field force?” to find out on what to pay particular attention in this respect.

Continue reading →

Which is the best way to manage your field reps? Centralized route planning by the in-house team or decentralized planning by the field reps themselves? In any case, the objective is the best possible customer service, i.e. meet call frequencies, react immediately to customer requests, and avoid forgetting customers. On top of that, no time shall be wasted on the road and efficient and optimized routes are the top priority. Read here how to plan good routes for your field staff – centralized, decentralized or a combination of both using the modern route planner portatour®.

Continue reading →

Have you always asked yourself which customers your field reps visit and where? Are you interested in visualizing your field reps’ call reports on a map and possibly analyzing them together with other key indicators? The new Power Map feature of Excel 2013 and Power Pivot for data analysis is able to create even complex visualizations. The following article will give you step-by-step instructions for the setup. For this purpose we use call reports entered into the portatour® field rep software which can be directly imported into Excel and updated at the push of a button.

Continue reading →

Field staff have different possibilities of getting more customers and achieving a higher turnover. An important aspect is good route planning: Which customers shall be visited on which days and in which order? Currently many sales reps and field staff still either drive “chaotically” to any customer who raised their attention or make the effort of always planning their daily, weekly or monthly tours manually. The first is ineffective, the latter is time-consuming and makes it difficult to achieve all your targets. Unnecessary kilometres are often the consequence. Nowadays there exists advanced software for route planning that automates the entire process. A computer can both calculate your routes quicker and achieve better results. Learn from this article how to get started with automatic route planning.

Continue reading →

In order to calculate better and more realistic routes for you, portatour® uses historical traffic data as the basis for its optimization algorithm. Millions of drivers have collected data that shows how quick one really travels on which street. Read more to find out why this helps you to visit more customers and spend less time on the road.

Continue reading →