Route planning in field sales: a week in ten minutes

By Manuel Ober · September 6, 2026 · 6 min read

Why planning the week eats so much time

Most reps plan their week on a Sunday evening. An hour, sometimes two. And by Tuesday the plan is wrong again, because a customer cancels or a meeting runs long.

That is not a lack of discipline. It happens because the planning usually runs in the wrong order: first one appointment gets typed into a calendar slot, then the next one, and only at the end does it become obvious that Monday has three customers in three different districts. So it gets rebuilt. And rebuilt again.

Turn the order around and you are done in ten minutes. Here is how.

Step 1: Who is actually due?

Before you write anything into a calendar, you need an answer to a single question: which customers am I up for this week?

For that, every customer needs two entries: the last call and the intended gap between two calls. An A customer every 30 days, a B customer every 45, a C customer every 90. Those two give you who is overdue, who falls due in the next two weeks and who can wait.

That list is your week. Not the calendar, not the spreadsheet with all 300 customers, but the 15 to 25 names that are up now.

Rule of thumb: anyone with more than 25 customers due has either promised a call cycle the territory cannot carry, or has too many customers in it. No plan fixes either one; that is a conversation with your manager.

Step 2: Group by area, not by importance

The most common mistake: the most important customers go on Monday, wherever they happen to be. The result is 200 kilometres for four calls.

Better: look at the due customers on a map and group them by area. Everything in the north on one day, everything in the south on another. An A customer who comes up on Thursday is no less important than one on Monday. He is just important on a different day.

Anyone who has never seen their customer list on a map should do it once. Most people find that their territory looks different from what they had in mind: two customers who sit one under the other in the list are 80 kilometres apart, and three customers nobody ever thought of together are in the same street.

Step 3: Set the order by real drive times

Only now does the order within a day come up. And this is where the mistake sits that costs 40 minutes a day: most people estimate drive times in their head, because nobody types seven legs into a sat nav one by one on a Friday.

Between two customers there can be 18 minutes or 50, depending on the route and the time of day, and an estimate remembers the best run, not the typical one. If you do not work the times out, you plan a day with six calls and end up with five.

Real drive times come out of any sat nav, but only for the next leg, and only laboriously for seven legs in a row. A route planner that works them out on its own saves the most time exactly here. What that amounts to in practice is in the guide Why the field sales day runs longer than planned.

Step 4: Build in opening hours and a buffer

A pharmacy that closes from 12:30 to 14:00 turns a perfect plan into a bad one if you are standing at the door at 12:45. The same goes for doctors' practices with afternoon surgery hours and for plants on an early shift.

So opening hours belong in the plan, not in your head. And every day needs a buffer: one appointment that can drop out without the others wobbling. Five calls with room beat seven without. The seventh falls anyway, and then the sixth goes with it.

A day that works looks like this:

• The first appointment where the customer opens early, usually from 8am.
• The long drives in the morning, while your head is still fresh.
• Lunch where there is a break anyway: in the area of the pharmacy that is closed.
• The last appointment placed so the drive home misses the evening rush.

Step 5: The plan has to be everywhere

A plan that only exists in a notebook only applies in the notebook. On Monday morning in the car you need it on your phone, in the office on the computer, at the customer on the phone again.

Anyone planning in Excel knows the problem: the file is on the laptop, the phone has an old version, and the note from the customer meeting is on a scrap of paper. A plan that syncs itself between devices saves you the copying, and the mistakes that come with it.

What happens when a customer cancels?

That is the real test for any plan. If the third appointment on Tuesday cancels, the rest of the day has to hold. With a handwritten list that means working it all out again. With the buffer from step 4 it means the buffer moves up.

A route planner that knows the drive times recalculates the rest of the day as soon as a call drops out or gets moved. That is the difference between a plan and a list.

The checklist for ten minutes

1. Filter out the customers that are due; do not look at the whole list.
2. Group by area on the map, one district per day.
3. Order by real drive times, for every leg of the day.
4. Check opening hours, leave one buffer per day.
5. Get the plan onto every device, then drive.

How trakki does it

trakki grew out of exactly this method. The app takes your customer list, shows on the map who is due, and lays out the week with real road times, opening hours and a break. If a call drops out, the rest of the day recalculates. Your data stays on your device and syncs with your computer over your own storage or your Wi-Fi.

More on the home page and in the guide Getting your Excel customer list onto a map.

Frequently asked questions

How many customers a day is realistic?

That depends on the territory. In a city eight short calls are possible; out in the country, with 40 kilometres between customers, more like four or five. What matters is not the number but whether the drive times are right. A day with five calls on time is worth more than one with seven planned and five made.

Should I plan the week on Friday or on Sunday?

On Friday. You still know what slipped this week, and the weekend stays yours. Anyone who gets the planning down to ten minutes can also do it on Monday at seven, before the first drive begins.

What if my territory is too big for day trips?

Then you need multi-day trips with an overnight stay. How to decide when an overnight stay pays off is in the guide Stay over or drive home.