– By Caroline Falls –
In June TomTom Telematics announced the availability of its fleet management service Webfleet for Sales Cloud on the Salesforce App Exchange, a move tipped to open up a vast new market for the fleet management software — sales fleets.
The Webfleet for Sales Cloud app integrates the TomTom Telematics award-winning telematics platform with Salesforce, making it possible for sales managers to track sales staff vehicles using the customer relationship management software, or CRM, on the road. Salesforce App Exchange is a bit like Apple’s iTunes store. It has more than 2,800 partner apps — sales, marketing, and CRM — and more than three million customer installs, making it the world’s most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile and social data technologies for business.
The collaboration of these two titans — TomTom Telematics (which has more than 650,000 subscriptions worldwide) and Salesforce resolves the missing link for managing field sales fleets, or white-collar sales fleets.
While telematics has made inroads and productivity improvements for delivery fleets and maintenance service fleets, so-called white-collar sales fleets haven’t been able to get the same benefits — until this development. The TomTom Telematics–Salesforce integration means sales vehicles can be tracked and produce information that any business will be able to use to make productivity improvements.
“It will enable companies to manage their sales forces more efficiently and empower them to connect with customers, partners and employees in a whole new way,” said TomTom Telematics Australia Sales Manager Christopher Chisman-Duffy.
“This integration is going to give sales managers more information about their sales teams and what they are doing. Sales people will have all the data such as customer contact details at the click of a button on their dashboard.”
It will also make the return on investment in telematics for this type of sales vehicle fleet more measureable. It’s been hard to calculate up until this development because it was impossible to quantify the productivity gains that the less complex delivery fleets had been able to.
Webfleet for Sales Cloud allows office staff to assign client appointments in the Salesforce calendar to the employee’s TomTom driver terminal. It also provides the sales manager with trip data on sales opportunities, leads and closed deals to analyse the effectiveness of each sales representative.
The integration of Webfleet and Sales Cloud can help to reduce costs and administration time through automatic trip reporting and simplified appointment management. Businesses and drivers are also provided with greater insight into driving performance.
Webfleet produces a variety of reports based on data received from the vehicle that can be designed to specific business requirements, while Sales Cloud is built on the Salesforce software platform which enables sales representatives and managers to find new leads and follow deal history among other features.
“Integrating Webfleet with Salesforce is a natural extension of our Logbook application, which automates mileage registration for expense claims. Both help to make business administration easier for staff on the road, providing them with tools to improve their sales performance. Furthermore, by combining telematics and CRM, sales managers can gain visibility and insight into performance in the field,” said Taco van der Leij, vice-president of marketing at TomTom Telematics.
