How to check your salesmen's work without spying on them

There are two ways to get this wrong. One is to trust completely and find out at month end that half the route was never visited. The other is to watch every move, phone every hour, and lose your best salesman to a distributor who treats him like an adult.

The middle path is to check the work, not the man. Everything you need is already in the bills he makes.

Five numbers that show whether the route is being worked

1. Shops on today’s list vs shops billed. If the list has 35 and he billed 22, that is a conversation. If he billed 33, he is working.
2. First and last bill of the day. A first bill at 11:30 on a route that opens at 9 tells you more than any tracker.
3. Products per bill. A salesman who only takes what the shop asks for is an order-taker. See lines per call.
4. Money collected vs money due on the route. Visiting a shop and not asking for the old bill is half a visit.
5. Returns and breakage per van. One bad week is bad luck. The same pattern every week is a habit.

How to talk about the numbers

• Once a week, one to one. Not in front of the others.
• Compare him with his own last month, not with the best man on the team. People improve against their own record.
• Ask before you accuse. “Twelve shops on Tuesday weren’t billed. What happened?” gets the truth; “you skipped twelve shops” gets an excuse.
• Say the good out loud. The week a salesman opens three new shops, tell the whole team.

If you use location tracking

Say so on day one, and say when it is on: working hours, not his evenings. Present it as protection: when a shop claims he never came, the record shows he did. A tracker he finds out about later destroys trust; one you explained becomes part of the job. Our guide on getting salesmen to use the app covers this in more detail.

How Mulberry Sales helps

Each weekday can have its own shop list, and every bill records the shop and the time it was made on the salesman’s phone. His day starts and ends with a clock-in and clock-out (Starter plan and up). The live map shows where each clocked-in salesman is right now; it is not a replay of his day, and it shows nobody who is off duty (Growth plan and up). Reports break sales down by salesman for any dates (Growth plan and up). See van sales software.