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Key takeaways
- Google Maps allows at most nine intermediate stops including the final destination, and the order can only be sorted manually by dragging.
- The ADAC Traffic Jam Report 2025 recorded 478,000 hours of congestion on German autobahns, around 7 percent more than in 2024, with peaks on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
- The Federal Labour Court counts trips to the first and from the last customer as compensable working time.
- Manual prep and follow-up cost around one hour per appointment, but can be shifted into drive time by voice call.
How do you plan a field sales route step by step?
A good route isn't built on the morning of the first appointment, but the day before, in four steps. Set these steps up cleanly once, and from then on you'll plan every week in minutes instead of hours. The difference between a full calendar and a real daily route isn't the app - it's the order of decisions: territory first, then customers, then times.
- Set up your customer list: All active customers and prospects with address, revenue, and last visit date in one place, for example in your CRM or a spreadsheet. This list is your master data source for every step that follows.
- Bundle territory clusters: Group your customers by postal code, direction, or radius around a hub. Three to five clusters are enough for most territories. Each cluster later becomes one route day.
- Derive the daily route: Define one route per cluster with a fixed start and end time. First stop close to home or the previous night's hotel, then in a logical line through the cluster, last stop on the way home.
- Check the order: Go through the route one more time at the end: Does the order make sense once you factor in morning and afternoon traffic? Is your A-customer not sitting at the worst possible time of day by chance?
The most important step is the capacity calculation, which most field reps skip. The formula: available working time minus buffer, divided by drive time plus conversation time plus follow-up time per appointment.[1] The result is the realistic number of stops per day. Ignore it, and you'll plan six appointments into a day that realistically fits five - then push the overflow into your evening.[1] For more on processes, tools, and best practices in field sales, check out our field sales guide.
Are Google Maps and Excel enough for route planning?
At first glance: yes. For a real route: only up to a point. Google Maps accepts multiple destinations, but the limit is at most nine intermediate stops including the final destination.[1] And Maps doesn't sort the order for you: you have to drag every stop manually into position via drag-and-drop.[1] So Maps shows you how to get from A to B, but not which order from A to I is the shortest.
Microsoft Excel has the opposite problem. Excel knows no drive times, no live traffic data, and optimizes nothing. What Excel does well: making priorities visible. A sorted customer list with revenue and last visit is an excellent planning input. Only the route itself doesn't come out of Excel.
Why the manual order hits its limits faster than you'd think: that's the travelling salesman problem. With every additional stop, the number of possible sequences explodes, and your gut feeling checks maybe three of them. From about five to six stops per day, it's worth using a route planner that automatically optimizes the order by drive time. Below that, Maps for the route and Excel for priorities are perfectly sufficient.
Which customers belong in which route?
The most common planning trap: you collect appointments one by one, whenever a customer has a free slot, and by Friday you wonder why you drove across your territory three times. The better way is the reverse: first the cluster, then the customers. You combine customer value and location instead of looking at them separately.
- Rank customers by revenue or contribution margin: The ABC analysis sorts your customer list by value. Following the Pareto principle, the bulk of your revenue comes from a small group of customers, while a long tail of small accounts contributes little.
- Give A-customers fixed slots: Your A-customers get reliable appointments on a weekly or biweekly rhythm. These appointments are the anchors of your route days and get planned first.
- Schedule B- and C-customers: B- and C-customers fill the remaining capacity around the anchor appointments, ideally in the same territory cluster. A C-customer near an A-customer costs you almost no drive time; a C-customer at the other end of your territory does.
Important context: visit frequency here is only an input for prioritization, meaning the question of who belongs in a full day. How often you should actually visit which customer is its own topic with its own rules. As a rule of thumb for daily planning: two to three customers per territory cluster take priority over scattered routes across the territory. A route with three well-matched customers in the same cluster beats a route with five customers in three directions of the compass, week after week.
How much buffer does each appointment need?
A route calculated without buffer breaks down at the first traffic jam. And on German autobahns, traffic jams are not the exception but the norm: the ADAC traffic jam report for 2025 counts 478,000 hours of congestion on autobahns, around 7 percent more than the previous year.[2] According to ADAC, Wednesdays and Thursdays are particularly jam-prone, and on weekdays there are pronounced congestion peaks in the morning between 6 and 9 a.m.[2] and in the afternoon between 2 and 7 p.m. These are exactly the windows into which the outbound and return drives of a typical field sales day fall.
- Parking and the walk in: In an industrial park or downtown, that's easily 10 to 15 minutes that never show up in any route calculation.
- Small talk and reception: The path from signing in to the actual conversation is part of the appointment, even if it's not on the agenda.
- Meetings running over: Good customer conversations run longer than planned. Plan for your most important appointment of the day to run 20 minutes over, and don't schedule a tight follow-up right after it.
- Follow-up: Notes, CRM updates, and next steps take time. If you don't plan for them, they drift into the evening.
As a rule of thumb: allow 10 to 15 minutes of buffer per appointment for parking and small talk, more in metropolitan areas or around public holidays and long weekends. For fixed appointment windows on site, for example when the customer asks you to check in at reception, less is enough. What matters is that the buffer sits in your daily plan, not just in your head.
Does the drive to your first customer count as working time?
Yes. In a landmark ruling, the Federal Labour Court decided: in field sales, drives from home to the first customer and from the last customer back home are working time that must be paid.[3] Works agreements that shorten or cut these times are invalid if the applicable collective agreement attributes them to working time without restriction.[3]
- The first and last drive belong in your daily plan: These times are working time and therefore part of your capacity calculation, not a commute before work.
- Extreme edge locations strain your working-time account: If you drive very early to your first customer or very late from your last one, that edge drive consumes real working time.
- Long edge drives crowd out appointments: An hour's drive to your first customer is an hour in which no appointment happens. The territory cluster planning from step 1 shifts that time to where it creates value.
For your route planning, this means: factor the edge drives in when you decide how many stops per day are realistic. A day with two hours of edge driving carries fewer appointments than a day when your first territory cluster is close to your home. This isn't red tape - it's simply capacity.
How do you use the drive between two appointments productively?
Now comes the point most route plans overlook. The route itself is quickly planned, but the hour that's actually lost only appears once the appointment is over. You know the drill: your last appointment ends at 5 p.m., and in the evening you type up the visit report and CRM updates while the details of the conversation are already getting fuzzy. Manual prep and follow-up cost roughly an hour per appointment, and with several appointments per day, that's exactly the time you're missing for customers or family.
The alternative: move the briefing and the report into the drive time that otherwise evaporates as dead time. Before the next stop, you get briefed by voice call from your CRM data: who you're meeting, what the last conversation achieved, which offers are open. After the appointment, you dictate the visit report from the car or via hands-free system instead of typing it in the evening. No catching up, no filling in fields.
- Briefing before the appointment: meeting prep by voice call, based on CRM data and previous conversation notes, while you drive to the customer.
- Visit report after the appointment: you talk freely about the conversation, and the report is structured from it - no typing required.
- CRM update by voice: deal stage, next steps, contacts visited and products discussed land in the right fields via Voice-to-CRM, supported for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, HubSpot and SAP.
- Follow-up on the drive home: the follow-up email is drafted while the conversation is still fresh and waits in your inbox for review.
The old way is evening desk work in the sales routine, reconstructed from memory. The new way is a call from the car, right after the appointment, with a fresh memory. We describe exactly this shift in detail in Update your CRM automatically and in our visit report guide. The documentation itself runs GDPR-compliant and without recording the conversation. That's exactly where the Bliro Phone Assistants (Vicky & Tim) come in: two personal assistants you reach by voice call on your phone, for briefing, visit report and CRM update between two appointments.
You now have all the building blocks. Before you plan your next route tomorrow, run through this checklist once:
- Set territory clusters before appointments: bundle customers by postal code, compass direction or radius, and plan one cluster per day instead of collecting appointments across the whole territory.
- Calculate stops per day with a buffer: available working time minus buffer, divided by drive time plus conversation plus follow-up time. Allow 10 to 15 minutes of buffer per appointment and count the edge drives as working time.
- Respect working time rules: the drive to the first and from the last customer counts as paid working time and belongs in the calculation.
- Put Google Maps, Excel and route planners in the right perspective: up to about five stops, Maps works for the route and Excel for priorities; beyond that, a route planner optimizes the order automatically.
- Move briefing and visit report into the drive time: voice call before the appointment, report and CRM update afterwards from the car - instead of at the kitchen table in the evening.
This flips the real loss calculation: the route saves drive time, and the drive time that remains works for you instead of against you. Your appointments win the route; your evenings, the drive time.
Sources
A Day in the Life of a Field Sales Rep, Powered by Bliro.
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