Two towns, one week, ninety minutes apart

A sales rep visits a customer in Leuven and a customer in Hoogstraten in the same week. Two appointments, both useful, both neatly in the calendar.

Except there is roughly an hour and a half of driving between them. Twice, because he has to get back as well.

That is not the rep's mistake. It follows from how the planning comes about: based on who called, who has not been seen for a while, and where someone is used to going. Geography does not come into it, because nobody has the overview.

What a phone already knows

The annoying part is that the solution is not complicated. A phone knows where it is. Your customer database knows where your customers are. Bringing those two together is not a technical feat.

What you get is a screen that says: here is where you are now, these are the customers within twenty minutes, and this is who you have not seen for the longest.

That changes the conversation in the car. An appointment that falls through is no longer a lost morning, because there are three alternatives ten minutes away. And a trip to a distant customer automatically becomes a trip to three customers in that same corner.

From a flat export to something usable

At the client where we built this, the customer database was an export from Exact. A flat list with addresses in it, no coordinates, and therefore no sense of distance at all.

The steps are the same every time. You convert addresses into coordinates. You pull the sales history alongside, so that per customer you know what they are worth and when they last ordered. And you set down what earns a visit: a customer with declining revenue is more urgent than a customer who stays stable, even if you have not seen the stable one for longer.

That last part is the real work, because that is where the decision sits. The map is only a display.

What you put on it

Three layers are enough.

Your existing customers, colored by how urgent a visit is. Urgent is not the same as long ago, because a small customer you have not seen for a year can happily wait another year, while a large customer with two months of silence can be a problem.

Your prospects, if you have them. A prospect near a planned appointment is almost free, because the drive has already been made.

And your visit history, so you can see afterwards whether visits actually deliver anything. That is an uncomfortable number to produce, but without it you keep planning on instinct.

Where it goes wrong

Two things to watch.

The first is that this feels like surveillance. A system that knows where your people are is not neutral to a lot of people, and rightly so. The way you introduce it decides whether it gets used or worked around. My experience: build it as a tool for the rep, not as reporting for the owner. If the people on the road are better off themselves, it takes care of itself.

The second is that optimizing a route is not the same as optimizing a calendar. Some customers you want to see at a fixed moment. Some appointments are too important to squeeze in between two others. The system should suggest, not decide.

What it delivers

The gain is not in the kilometers, although that helps too. The gain is in what does happen in those hours.

An hour and a half there and an hour and a half back is half a working day. Anyone who saves that twice a week has gained a visiting day without anybody working harder. And anyone who sees their customer base on a map notices immediately which corners are structurally neglected.

That last one is often the real insight. Not next week's route, but the realization that a whole province has barely been visited for months because nobody there happened to call.

The claim

A visit plan that does not account for distance is not a plan. It is a list of good intentions in the order they arrived.