For territory based sales reps, visit : drive time ratio SHOULD be a critical kpi and sales team productivity focus.  Sadly, very few B2B sale organisations measure it.  As our cities get bigger and bigger, and our roads get more and more clogged, this metric should be closely monitored for territory mapping and itinerary journey planning.

Lets start with drive time between visits.

• Step 1 = make assumptions for average drive speed, eg 35kph for metro; 85kph for regional
• Step 2 = calculate your metro and your regional customer/prospect concentration, ie number of entities per km2
• Step 3 = calculate the average distance between each entity – both for regional and then metro, ie square root of 100 divided by square root of your concentration number from above
• Step 4 = overlay a “degree of difficulty” factor to the numbers building up thus far.  “DoD” is to reflect the degree of difficulty in getting appointments and/or dropping in whenever you like.  Use an index of, say, 0 -> 5, where a multiplication of 5 multiplies up the previous number
• Step 5 = overlay a “drive by” factor to the numbers building up thus far.  “DBF” is to reflect your degree of in-field targeting , whereby if you call on your top tier customers, say monthly, but you Tier 2 customers , say, quarterly, then there will be a ratio-ed mathematical drive by factor to account for the degree to which you will drive by some non-top tier customers to get to top tier customers accordingly
• Step 6 = now calculate your drive time between visits – both metro and regional, culminating all the build ups thus far
• Step 7 = now calculate your % split between regional and metro visit workload.  Remember “visit workload” is a multiplication of number of customers –by – class times visit frequencies –by-class.
• Step 8 = Now calculate your overall weighted drive time.  this can be done at more than one level, eg territory or whole-of-team.

Come back next week and we will start to overlay visit time.