trakki
Route planning with Google Maps: the limits
By Manuel Ober · · 4 min read
What Google Maps can really do in field sales
More than its reputation suggests, once you know three functions that most people never open.
Several stops in one route. In the route planner you can add further stops through the three-dot menu, up to ten in total. The order can be changed by dragging, and at a desk Google will sort them for you if you ask.
Custom maps (Google My Maps). At mymaps.google.com you can upload an Excel or CSV list, and every address lands as a point on the map. The points can be coloured by a column, by customer class for example. It is the quickest way to see a territory properly for the first time. What the list has to look like for that is in the guide Getting your Excel customer list onto a map.
Lists and offline maps. Customers can be saved into named lists, and the area can be downloaded for the drive, which is useful in places where the signal drops out.
Where it stops
The limits are not bugs. They are a different job. Google Maps is a navigation program, not a planning program.
It does not know who is up. The central question in field sales is not “how do I get to these six customers fastest”, it is “which six should they be”. Due dates, call cycles and the last contact do not appear in it.
It works out the drive, not the day. The time at the customer is missing, the lunch break is missing, hunting for a parking space is missing. Six legs, seven minutes out each, are forty minutes by the evening. Why that happens is in the guide Drive times in field sales.
It does not know your customers' opening hours. For a restaurant Google shows opening hours; for your customer's practice that closes on Wednesday afternoon, not reliably. If you do not maintain that yourself, you will now and then drive there for nothing.
Ten stops is the ceiling. For one field sales day that is usually enough. For an overview of a whole week it is not.
It recalculates nothing when somebody cancels. The route can be changed, but the rest of the day does not reorder itself.
The point where it tips over
Google Maps is enough as long as you carry three things in your head: who you want to visit, when they can see you, and how long you stay. With twenty customers that works. With three hundred customers on three different call cycles it does not, and your head becomes the bottleneck.
A simple test: if on a Sunday evening you spend longer thinking about which customers go into the week than about what order you drive them in, then Google Maps is no longer your tool for the first part.
The combination that works
Plenty of people in field sales do well with a division of labour that costs nothing:
- Planning in a list or an app: who is due, what fits together, roughly what the day looks like.
- Driving in Google Maps: the actual navigation, with live traffic.
That division is also the reason trakki has no navigation of its own. For driving, Google Maps is better than a small app will ever be. The question that comes before it is the one that stays open.
How trakki does it
trakki answers the first part and hands over the second. The map shows who is due, the day plan works with real drive times, opening hours and time spent at the customer, and if somebody cancels, the rest reorders itself. For the drive itself, one tap opens the navigation. Trying it costs nothing, to the home page.
Frequently asked questions
How many stops can Google Maps plan at once?
Ten, including start and finish, through the function for several stops in the route planner. At a desk the order can also be optimised automatically.
Can I load my Excel customer list into Google Maps?
Yes, through Google My Maps. The list needs a clean address column, and then every row becomes a point. For planning over time it is still only a view: My Maps works out neither due dates nor how long a day takes.
Is Google Maps free for field sales?
For normal use yes, including My Maps. Costs only arise when a company builds the Google interfaces into its own software, and that concerns developers, not the rep in the car.