Route planning for commercial sales reps: plan the day around who is open

Route planning for a rep who sells to homes is mostly about miles. Commercial reps have a different problem. The buildings you sell to keep hours, the people you need keep their own hours inside those, and a property office that closes at noon on Friday does not care how tight your loop was.

This guide covers how to build a day that reaches doors while they are open, how much time to plan for each visit, what to do when a stop falls through, and how to plan a whole week by area.

Business hours are the real constraint

Start every plan with hours, then worry about distance. Two kinds of hours matter.

• The building's hours. When the doors are open to visitors. A leasing office, a medical office or a church office has posted hours. Check the Google profile, and check it the day before, because holiday and seasonal hours change.
• The decision maker's hours. When the person you need is free to talk. A hotel never closes, but the general manager keeps something like office hours. A senior living community is open all day, but the executive director is easier to catch away from meal times.

A few patterns hold in most territories:

• Restaurants: stay away during the lunch and dinner rush. Mid-afternoon is usually the quiet window.
• Schools: avoid arrival and dismissal. Facilities staff often start early and may be at the district office, not the school.
• Churches: many offices keep weekday hours only, and some close one weekday.
• Property and leasing offices: hours vary a lot. Some close for lunch or close early one day a week, so check each one.
• Medical offices: the front desk is focused on patients. Ask for the practice or office manager and expect a short window.

Order your stops

Once you know who is open when, put the day together in this order:

1. Fixed appointments first. Meetings and promised come-backs are tied to a time. Everything else fits around them.
2. The stop that closes soonest. More on this in the next section.
3. Nearest next. From each stop, go to the closest one that will be open when you get there. It is a simple rule, and it keeps you from crossing town twice.
4. Clean up the zigzags. Look at the route on a map. If the line crosses itself, swap the stops that cross.
5. End on the way home. The last stop of the day should be on your way back to home or the shop, not an hour past it.

Cluster wherever you can. Office parks, medical campuses, strip centers and apartment corridors put several doors within walking distance. Park once and work the whole cluster.

Go first to the stop that closes soonest

This is the rule reps break most often. A pure nearest-first route might save you a few miles and get you to a property office at 12:10 when it closed at noon. Now you have lost the stop, and maybe the come-back you promised too.

Before you leave in the morning, look for any stop that closes within the next two hours. Go there first, even if it is not the closest, and plan the rest of the day from that point. A few extra miles beat a locked door.

Plan buffer time for every visit

A visit is never just the conversation. You park, walk in, wait for the front desk, wait for the manager, talk, leave something behind, and log the outcome before you pull out. Plan a fixed block for every stop. Twenty minutes is a reasonable starting point for a cold visit, and you can adjust once you know your territory.

Then do the math honestly. Take the hours you have, subtract lunch and drive time, and divide by your visit block. That is your real number of stops. Leave one slot open for the conversation that runs long, because the good ones usually do.

When a door falls through

Doors fall through every day. The manager is out, the office closed early, or the meeting got moved. Have a plan before it happens.

• Log it anyway. Record "not in" or "left card" so you know to return, and ask the front desk when the manager is usually in.
• Knock the neighbors. In an office park or a medical campus, there is almost always another door a short walk away.
• Pull a nearby backup. Keep a short list of open leads and quiet customers near your route. A customer you have not seen in a few months is often a better use of the gap than a cold door.
• Make calls. Twenty spare minutes in the parking lot is enough to confirm tomorrow's meetings or work through your follow-ups.

Plan the week by area

Daily planning gets much easier when the week is already split up. Divide your territory into zones that each hold a full day of stops, and give each zone a day. Monday might be the north side, Tuesday the medical district, and so on.

• When someone wants a meeting, try to book it on the day you are already in that zone.
• Rotate your top customers through the zones so each one sees you on a steady rhythm.
• Keep one flexible half day for come-backs and anything that slipped.
• Print or share the week so your manager knows where you will be.

An area plan also makes your results easier to read. If one zone keeps producing meetings and another keeps producing locked doors, you will see it within a few weeks.

Hand the driving to your map app

A good plan decides the order. Your map app handles the driving: turn-by-turn directions, traffic and closed roads. Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze all do that well, so there is no reason to work out traffic in your head. Send the app your next stop, or the whole ordered list if your app takes several stops, and drive.

Keep the plan and the map separate. When a stop falls through, change the plan, then send the new next stop to the map. If you edit the map instead, you lose track of the order and the hours.

Once the day is planned, the commercial canvassing guide covers what to do at each door, and the guide to finding commercial buildings covers how to fill the list in the first place.

Where LASSO fits

LASSO's field app builds the day the way this guide describes, then gets out of the way.

Stop list Optimized from here

1

Riverside CommonsOpen until 6 PM. Visited.

Talked

2

Crestline Property ManagementCloses 12:00, 0.4 mi

Next

3

Northgate Medical PlazaOpen until 5 PM, 1.1 mi

4

Maple Grove Senior LivingOpen until 6 PM, 0.8 mi

5

Oakmont SuitesOpens at 1 PM, 2.3 mi

Sample data

• Stops with hours. For buildings that came from a Google listing, each stop shows "Open until 5 PM", "Opens at 9 AM" or "Closed today".
• Optimize. One tap orders the stops by distance and business hours from where you stand. A stop that closes within two hours goes first, and LASSO tells you if a stop would be closed when you get there.
• Time per visit. Arrival times are planned with 20 minutes at each stop plus an estimated drive.
• Near me now. When a door falls through, it lists the closest open leads and quiet customers so you can add one as a stop.
• Plan my week. Spreads your accounts across the days you choose, one part of the territory per day in driving order, and keeps booked meetings on their day. You can print it.
• Hand off to the map. Start route opens Google Maps with the stops in order. Apple Maps and Waze take one stop at a time, and every stop has its own Go button.

LASSO does not do traffic or turn-by-turn directions. It plans the order and hands the driving to the map app you already use. Door outcomes (Talked, Not in, Left card, Not interested) are one tap from the same list, so logging the day takes a tap per stop.

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