When I talk about using a fleet tracking solution with sales executives, a typical first reaction often goes like this: "I don't need to track my team. If they’re not selling, it'll show in the numbers." And, the statement is undoubtedly right. As a former sales leader myself, I never lacked for indicators of whether a member of my team was working smartly—creating a 45–60 day pipeline, knowing their quota gap and showing a plan to close the deal, having a crisp opening and asking smart probing questions. 

However, using fleet tracking to help capture more information about actual sales execution is different than managing individuals’ performance. Sure, you can see where your representatives are and where they’ve been. For new sellers and those who aren’t performing as well as they should be, this full visibility can help you out-compete companies who are selling from the couch instead of your prospects’ locations. Robust fleet tracking solutions provide countless features that add useful insight to help optimize sales performance. These are three that you might not expect:

1. Territory Alignment

Unless you have a problem seller, you probably have little interest in constantly reviewing everyone's location in real time. But when location information is analyzed over time and you’re able to see how people actually move and travel, you can see concentrations in activity, and, conversely, underserved parts of the map. You can also easily spot overlap and visualize how realignment may benefit your ability to hit numbers.

2. Expense Management

Regardless of how well sales are performing, there aren’t too many sales executives who haven’t had the talk about controlling T&E from the CEO or CFO. To prevent these talks, a fleet tracking solution can help in many ways. First, proper territory alignment should bring efficiencies to market coverage, which results in less mileage. We’ve seen businesses save thousands of dollars in fuel by eliminating crisscrossing route patterns and territory overlap. Second, fleet tracking makes it easy for your sellers to tag trips in their vehicles as “business” or “personal,” and you’re going to have easy access to information to show that stops are at customer addresses for trips tagged as “business.” Third, in running large sales teams, I often find there to be an inverse relationship between sales performance and mileage expense — sellers use mileage reimbursement to augment low commissions. A fully integrated solution like this eliminates opportunities for underperformers to augment employees’ incomes through excessive mileage reimbursements.

3. Key Account Focus

For sellers that handle key accounts, being able to see the level of sales support and attention accounts receive is essential to managing performance. This visibility also helps you stay on top of the situation to make sure you don't get blind-sided to unseen (and unreported) gaps between your team and your most valuable customers.

A fleet tracking solution is an important tool for sales management. Not only will it give sales executives a powerful method to manage and improve sales numbers, but it will also give confidence to the rest of your executive team that you have the systems in place to effectively monitor and manage the sales force.

About the Author

Thomas Erdman is the president of the Fleet Division at Azuga Fleet. With more than 30 years of experience in the wireless and fleet telematics industries, Erdman oversees Azuga’s global sales, marketing, customer satisfaction, and operations.