In Field Sales, Driving is Not an Accomplishment (Money Monday)

If you are spending more time staring at your windshield instead of looking into your customers’ eyes, you are doing field sales wrong. 

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a resurgence in field sales. Businesses everywhere are adding field salespeople and sending representatives out into the territory to meet with customers face-to-face. 

And for good reason—human beings buy from human beings. The most powerful way to anchor relationships, solve problems, and sell more is to get in front of your customers.

With AI creating so much noise in the system, it’s getting harder to prospect via email and social media. Going out and knocking on doors has become an easier way to connect with people, build relationships, and open up opportunities in your pipeline. 

And the good news, at least for now, is that prospects are happy to see field sales pros and inviting them in to their businesses and homes. 

But with the resurgence of outside sales comes an age-old problem: Field salespeople have got to travel to get to customers. And here’s the brutal reality—the single greatest waste of time for field sales professionals is staring at a windshield.

On this Money Monday segment of the Sales Gravy Podcast I’m going to teach you exactly how to minimize windshield time and maximize face time. Because at the end of the day, you don’t get paid to drive. You get paid to sell.

The Windshield Time Delusion

Too many reps delude themselves into believing that driving from one place to another is “working.”

Let’s get something straight: Driving is not an accomplishment. I don’t care if you put 100 miles on your vehicle in a day. That doesn’t mean you accomplished anything meaningful. It just means you drove from one place to the next, burning dinosaurs and wasting time.

I see this all the time. Reps will drive to one customer, then drive all the way across their territory to another customer, instead of concentrating their work in a single geographic area. 

They’ll dead-head out to an appointment, then drive all the way back to the office, passing up dozens of prospects they could have walked into along the way.

Don’t confuse activity with productivity.  Just because you drove all over creation, that doesn’t mean you had a productive day. 

Your job is to be in front of customers, not behind a steering wheel. Every minute you spend staring at your windshield is a minute you’re not building relationships, solving problems, putting new opportunities in the pipe or closing deals.

The Mathematics of Effective Field Sales Territory Management 

Let me put this in perspective with some simple math that will blow your mind.

Let’s say you’re a typical field sales rep working in a moderate-sized territory. You make 5 customer visits per day, and between poor route planning and territory management, you spend an average of 45 minutes driving between each appointment. That’s 3 hours and 45 minutes of windshield time daily.

Over a 5-day work week, that’s 18 hours and 45 minutes of non-productive driving time. That’s nearly half of your work week spent accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Now, let’s say you tighten up your territory management and reduce that drive time to 20 minutes between appointments through better planning. You’re now down to 1 hour and 40 minutes of windshield time daily, or 8 hours and 20 minutes weekly.

You just freed up more than 10 hours per week. That’s enough time for 15 to 20 additional customer visits or prospect calls. Over a month, that’s 60-80 more customer touchpoints. Over a year, that’s 720-960 additional opportunities to build relationships and generate revenue.

The reps who figure out how to minimize windshield time don’t just have better work-life balance—they absolutely dominate their territories and blow past their quotas while their competitors are still driving around wastefully.

Map Your Territory Into Quadrants

This is why the first rule of field sales is getting your territory mapped, segmented, and planned to reduce drive time. 

I remember when I started out in field sales that the first thing my sales manager, a guy named Bob Blackwell, did was sit down with me and help me map my territory into daily quadrants where I’d be working on specific days of the week. 

He said if it’s Monday and you are in your Thursday quadrant, you better have a damn good reason. 

At the time, I didn’t understand exactly what we were doing but soon it made sense. By concentrating my focus each day in a tighter geographic area I wasted less time and made a lot more money. It was a lesson I never forgot. 

Start by printing out a map and grabbing a sharpie. 

Monday might be the northeast quadrant. Tuesday, the southeast. Wednesday, the southwest. Thursday, the northwest. Friday could be your flex day for special situations or your highest-priority accounts regardless of location.

Keep that map visible where you can see it. 

The tighter your route planning, the more selling time you create and the less windshield time you waste.

Yes, you will get off track from time to time. That’s the real world. But because you have built a set of tracks, when you get off, you’ll know where to get back on. 

The Hub-and-Spoke Model

Then use the hub-and-spoke model to maximize your time in each geographic area.

It works like this: Once you have an appointment booked on your calendar, use your CRM and mapping tools to pre-plan and route five additional drop-ins or door swings around that appointment. 

This will both increase the number of prospecting calls you make each day, and help you avoid the temptation to just head back to the office after your appointment.  

The T-Calling Technique to Boost Prospecting Activity

You’ll increase your productivity further with the practice of T-Calling. 

As you walk into or out of those pre-planned prospecting calls, look to your left, look to your right, and look behind you, then knock on those doors, too. 

Walk in. Introduce yourself. Build relationships. You’re already ther—you’ve already invested the windshield time to get to that location. Maximize your return on that investment.

Think about it, with this methodology you can easily make an additional 10 to 15 additional prospecting touches after each scheduled appointment. It’s how you squeeze every ounce of productivity out of your sales day.

Stay on Track With Better Decisions

Territory planning also helps you make better decisions about responding to customer requests. 

If a customer calls on Tuesday needing help, rather than dropping everything and driving all the way to their location, assess whether it’s truly an emergency or if it can wait until you’re in that part of your territory on Thursday.

Learn to say, “I’ll be in your ar