Although the sales management set sales targets for each field sales representative, it was not possible to gain an overview of the number and frequency of calls. The management did not have a clear picture of what was going on in the field.
It was necessary to bring our field sales force up to the latest technological standards, which we found in portatour®.
Efficient route planning with portatour®
portatour® considerably improved our whole sales and distribution system. We specified a targeted strategy for handling a sales territory. Active and potential customers were evaluated and visited with different call frequencies, according to their level of priority. The actual daily planning is still carried out by the field sales representatives themselves, but it is significantly supported by the automation of portatour®.
Before the implementation of portatour® the customer base had decreased for two successive years. The introduction of portatour® at the beginning of 2014 reversed this trend, with the customer base increasing by 6% within 9 months. Former customers who had stopped ordering were reactivated.
The field sales representatives now consistently record each visit in portatour® on their tablet computer. The resulting statistics have become a central source of information for our management.
With portatour® it is easy to test new call strategies with some of the field sales representatives and to evaluate the results, and if these are successful then we can apply them quickly to the whole sales force.
Efficient reporting with portatour®
It is often a problem for a field sales force to input reports consistently. At TUNAP, the entry forms in portatour® were set up in a user-friendly manner, so as to enable swift recording of data entries. The events occurring most frequently during a visit were pre-configured as reporting options. In the future, the adaptable data entry forms of portatour® will enable even more data to be gathered during a customer visit in order to support the other sales channels such as the online shop and telephone sales.