Picture this: You’re driving to the office of a potential customer – a hot prospect who could become one of your biggest accounts. It has taken you three months just to get your foot in the door, and the decision maker is giving you only 20 minutes. That’s OK, because you’ve practiced your pitch again and again, and you’re confident your message is concise and persuasive. You look great, you feel great…Uh oh. You get detoured around some major road work into a line of automobiles on unfamiliar streets. The snarled traffic and a few wrong turns make you half an hour late. Your prospect has moved on to another meeting and is not interested in rescheduling. You’re back to square one.

Even with the best of planning, sales road warriors are all too familiar with myriad automotive problems: detours, midday and rush-hour traffic jams, wrong turns and breakdowns, to name a few. This explains why Global Positioning System (GPS)-based navigation tools are becoming increasingly popular in fleet cars. These satellite-based systems can provide a graphical display showing where and when you need to turn to reach your destination – and more. Some versions offer motorist assistance, traffic advisories with suggested detours around jams, mileage tracking and features that allow users to type in notes from a sales call. Thus, at the end of the week all that’s needed is to download information to a laptop and – voila! – the call report is complete.

On Track
For enterprises with many salespeople on the road, the investment in this type of technology could be well worth it. Visteon Corp., a Dearborn, Michigan-based company whose name means “future vision,” found that salespeople lose an average of two hours a week in “getting lost” time. For someone whose salary, travel and benefits cost a company $200,000 a year, or $110 an hour, that’s $220 a week in wrong turns and unnecessary delays. The solution? A product such as Visteon’s NavMate, a portable navigation system that plugs into a cigarette lighter, could save $66,000 per week for a company with 300 salespeople, thus paying for itself in about six weeks, according to Michael Lipski, a Visteon sales account manager.

If you don’t want the expense of installing a full-blown navigation system, it may be worthwhile to investigate simple tracking technology. Are you convinced that your employees are 100 percent honest and hardworking? The technology can enable you to make their routes more efficient, thus lowering costs and improving productivity – and offer a surprise or two. That’s what happened to one pest control company that installed Advance Tracking Technologies Inc.’s (ATTI) Shadow Tracker Jr. in its fleet of trucks. With the technology, the company discovered a salesperson who spent most of his day at home, employees who took two- to three-hour lunches and other employees who would make multiple trips a day between house calls and their homes. By addressing these types of problems, the company immediately saw an increase in productivity and customer satisfaction, as well as a 30 percent reduction in its monthly fuel bills.

Customized for Sales Fleets
GPS-based navigation and tracking systems are nothing new. Many of them have been on the market for quite a few years. What’s new is that many of the companies who manufacture these systems are starting to customize them for sales fleets and sales managers. Visteon, for instance, is working on a tracking product for sales managers that will be able to show a car’s average speed, where it stopped, for how long, when it last had an oil change and other features, so that managers can better track and manage both their fleets and their people on the road, Lipski explains.

Fremont, California-based @Road, a provider of location-enhanced wireless Internet services, is going one step further. It currently is developing a wireless solution that Phil Tyler, @Road’s director of emerging business, says is expected to combine sales-force automation, expense reporting and fleet management to boost productivity and increase profitability. Salespeople could use the service to upload all customer contact information into the system and populate the map with customer locations. They also could record all business mileage, track time spent on the road and at each customer site and type notes into a text field after each sales call. “We could work with any CRM provider to link our system to theirs for downloading call reports,” says Tyler. This could include such items as customer name, time and length of visit, mileage information and call notes, he points out. For organizations with discounts at certain hotels and gas stations, the service could be programmed to show just those brands, with real-time driving directions to each of them.

Established in 1996, @Road is no newcomer to the fleet navigation scene. In 1999 it launched FleetASAP, an Internet-based management and service solution for companies with fleets of commercial vehicles, including taxis, pest control vehicles, delivery services, limousines, etc. FleetASAP not only tracks the activity of each driver – where they stopped, for how long, their direction of travel and speeds throughout the day – but also provides a snapshot showing where each vehicle may be located at any time, two-way text messaging, so dispatch can reroute a driver, and mileage tracking for maintenance.

Sales Managers’ Delight
On the other hand, NavLynx Technologies (America) Inc. has a challenge quite different from these other systems: It is feature rich for sales managers today, and the company is working on adding capabilities for salespeople. NavLynx is part navigation system, part tracking device and part communications system, complete with a jack for connecting a laptop computer. Conceivably, says Mike Baldwin, president and COO of NavLynx Technologies Corp., salespeople could get into their car after a sales call, type up notes or prepare an order request on their laptop, connect to the Internet through the NavLynx phone system and send those items to the office. The sales manager could then be reviewing the call notes, and the order department could be processing the customer’s request while the salespeople are driving to their next appointment. Not enough? Users can swipe a client’s credit card for approval and complete a sale right in the car.

NavLynx is modular, so sales managers can pick and chose the components that will be most useful for their teams and for their own monitoring. For instance, the system can be set up to measure impacts ranging from a minor door ding to a major accident. In the case of the latter, the system would alert the NavLynx call center, which in turn would call the driver on the hands-free phone. Want to ensure that fleet cars are being used only for work? Vehicles can be set up to operate only at certain hours of the day. Furthermore, sales managers can track not only the movements of their sales teams but also their speeds, and opt to be alerted if a certain speed limit is exceeded or an employee is driving recklessly.

The speed-tracking program recently came in handy for one NavLynx customer whose car was stolen. When the young auto thieves hit 80 miles an hour, the NavLynx call center was alerted; the operator recognized the car as stolen and called the police. Because NavLynx provided the police with up-to-the-minute details on the car’s speed and direction of travel, the law officials were able to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase and nab the thieves uneventfully when the car came to a stop at a red light and NavLynx remotely disabled it. Happily, the NavLynx customer had his stolen car returned unharmed.

NavLynx uses the Internet to post tracking information, so sales managers need only log on to check the status of their teams or print a report. In fact, managers could be away from the office in their own fleet cars and still check the status of their people by logging on to the Internet through NavLynx.

In addition to tracking functions, NavLynx also provides navigation capabilities so that drivers can press a single button and connect through the hands-free phone to an operator who can provide directions or rerouting information to get around traffic jams. The company is also working on an initiative whereby salespeople could preprogram the system for each destination throughout the day and receive verbal driving directions to get to each location.

Navigating the Road
Of course, not all sales managers will want or need a means by which to track their sales teams. For some, it may be enough simply to ensure that salespeople don’t get lost on the road. In that case, a system offering only navigation information may be enough. Thanks to a series of Batman-inspired ads, General Motor’s OnStar system is probably the most well-known of the navigation systems. It has been available as an option since 1996, but GM began factory installing the system about a year ago. It now comes standard on more than 34 vehicle types, which is great for fleet managers, because they don’t need to choose and install a separate navigation system if they opt for a GM fleet. (Within the next couple years, OnStar will be standard on every GM vehicle.)

As with the NavLynx system, drivers need only press one button and the OnStar operator’s voice will come through the radio speakers, asking what service they need. Drivers can adjust volume up or down with the radio’s volume control. To reply, they just speak normally; a small microphone located near their head will capture their voices. The OnStar operator can provide directions to your next call, direct you to such nearby convenience services as gas stations, hotels and restaurants, and call ahead to make reservations for you. If your car breaks down, OnStar not only can send help immediately but also can find the taxi cab closest to you if you’re really in a hurry. Lock your keys in the car? Just call with your cell phone and OnStar will remotely unlock the doors.

If you’re a real multitasker, you can even opt to have emails read to you while driving. You’ll need to set up a Website through My OnStar and set up your own email to forward into that site when you’re on the road. However, once that’s done you can use the car’s hands-free, voice-activated phone to log on to the Internet and have emails read, check stock prices or listen to weather forecasts and sports scores. It’s convenient, sure, but it’s not free. Calls using the onboard phone run about 19¢ to 23¢ a minute.

As technology progresses, these advanced systems are adding even more user-friendly features that will appeal to salespeople. VDO North America, for instance, plans to add voice activation capabilities within a year, according to Sean Lannoo, navigation product manager. A salesperson would be able to get into the car, say, “Navigation. Address book. XYZ Company,” and the system would automatically plot and progressively provide the route based on the user’s current coordinates. Adding new addresses would simply be a matter of a few voice commands. “Right now the system just talks to you to give you directions,” Lannoo says. “Eventually, we want to make it two-way communication.”

VDO North America already has made several upgrades to its navigation system over the past several years, including a 10-second reduction in the time required to recognize a route diversion and recalculate the route (it now takes just three seconds). Another upgrade is the introduction of a split screen with a map on one side and detailed animation showing the route and next turn on the other.

For salespeople who spend a lot of time hopping from rental car to rental car, a portable unit may be the best solution. Magellan Corporation came out with a $2,300 system, the 750M, in October 2000, updating it this summer with more detailed mapping. Now the database, which previously showed only a couple of main roads through some rural towns, offers a more complete picture of the street layout. “Our goal is to include every road in the U.S.,” explains Don Speedy, a regional sales manager with Magellan in Santa Clara, CA.

The 750M is the portable version of the company’s two-year-old installed system, the 750NAV. Among its features are TrueView, which shows the actual road layout with travel direction, next turn distance, estimated travel time and destination distance; Exit Authority Guide, which provides lodging, restaurant and other off-exit services for all U.S. interstate exits; Route Exclude, which lets you route around any traffic interference; Instant Locate, which can provide your exact location to emergency services, if needed; and Auto Re-Route, a feature that automatically recalculates route information when you miss a turn.

Speedy says that the product so far has been popular with real estate offices, which will buy one or two that agents can grab before heading out to a new home. The company also was starting to see a rise in business with sales fleets earlier this year.

They’re not the only ones. Navigation and tracking systems are the hottest trend in fleet vehicles today, and they are consistently proving their worth by increasing employee productivity and decreasing costs. However, whether you need a navigation system, a tracking system or one that does both, the good news is there are plenty of choices out there, and the products keep getting better and better. Who knows – maybe one day these systems will be able to do the driving for you. Then, rather than concentrating on the road, you’ll be able to concentrate on some final tweaks to your PowerPoint presentation on the way to your next client.