We’ve started to track the amount of miles we are covering in various parts of the business, starting with the sales team. Over a week we wanted to understand how much C02 we are producing through business miles, and also consider the practicalities of the alternatives.
Our sales team passed back details on the miles covered over 5 days (names changed to protect the innocent). Adding in the average C02 production per car per mile, the results of the weeks business miles are below.
So in all we generated almost a metric ton of C02 through our sales miles in a week, and not one of our most active weeks. If we repeated the same experiment with our 30+ project team members, the results would clearly be proportionately worse.
Considering the alternatives, we need to understand some of the drivers (no pun intended) for using a car in the first place:
1) The need to meet the prospect face to face in order to develop a relationship – particularly when the competition is doing the same
2) Busy diaries mean more than one prospect meeting in a day, potentially in different parts of the country, requiring the convenience of a car
3) The cost of public transport (particularly inter-city during peak hours), adding in taxi’s at either end, can be astronomical
There are alternatives - we have tried web-demos in the past, and when meetings are booked in advance public transport can sometimes work, and be cheaper than booking at the last minute. The challenge for me is more cultural. We want to develop a long term relationship with our clients and this means a face to face meeting, particularly at the start of the process. I’m not sure how many of our prospects would accept a telephone conference or a web demo, but then we don’t generally ask. We pay a lot of money for our sales leads, and we want to do everything we can to close every potential opportunity.
We need to think about this one. If we can’t completely take away the car, maybe we could consider the cars we drive (BTW I have a diesel 4×4, probably one of the worst), and perhaps incentivise people to drive cars with lower emissions. But then I read that hybrid cars produce more C02 as part of the manufacturing process, and smaller city cars would not be appropriate for the amount of motorway miles we do.
Any thoughts?
9 responses so far ↓
Grania Duffy // April 20, 2008 at 8:45 pm |
I have no problem using Conf calls etc when appropriate but I think some customers may view this as them not being important enough to come and physically see them. We could potentially use web cam so at least you can get visuals in the meeting but again not many companies would have these facilities on site I don’t think.
Simon Black // April 21, 2008 at 7:12 am |
Public transport involves lots of waiting around & outside of London means taxis for the last bit anyway. I always use public transport for meetings in London – congestion & high parking costs being the main drivers for this decision. And to be fair a regular train service to Harpenden from London.
Personally I’m not a fan of web demos as people still buy people & nothing beats face to face where that is concerned. However if I knew the person that might be different. Having said that they are a good way of doing a demo of a low value sale at low cost to ACL, my time being the biggest cost.
I’m not sure our customers are ready for web demos; it would be better if there was teleconference where we could see each other as well as hear and see the screen. There just too much non verbal communication going on!
Tom Farrell // April 21, 2008 at 7:13 am |
Alternative forms of transport as follows:
Northern Office – push bike or combination of trains followed by walking / taxi. Result = increased travel time & inconvenience
Client Site – combination of trains and taxi / buses / walking. Result = increased travel time & inconvenience
Harpenden Office – trains, plus taxi / walk to and form stations. Using a taxi / train combination the travel time may be similar – but inconvenient.
Use of conference calls / remote demos – yes definitely an alternative, but ‘face to face’ is an absolute requirement at some point to clinch most business deals.
Jessica Perry // April 21, 2008 at 7:15 am |
On Monday I had a meeting, but the customer came to the office. I think this did need to be a face to face meeting, as it also involved one of our consultants. We had to work through in some detail where they are in their project, which involved looking at some detail into their current set up. I guess they could have used public transport, but given where they are this would have involved a trip into London and then out again. Therefore, the travel time would probably have doubled.
Dom Thomas // April 21, 2008 at 7:18 am |
I think the only option going in to London is to take the train however I think it would be difficult and some times very time consuming to take public transport to the large majority of sites out side of London. The train however works very well for long distance journeys. The impact this may have is that trains are sometimes not on time (and cancel) and so may not go down well with customers.
I don’t feel any use would of come out of a web demo as there is no alternative to visiting people face to face when pitching for business.
However I have started to increasingly use more and more web demos to address specific areas or queries in the software.
Steve Thomas // April 21, 2008 at 7:20 am |
Last week I had 3 appointments and I ‘let the train take the strain’ on each one, which is unusual. Two were in central London and the third was in Brighton – which I could have driven to but wanted to take the M25 out of the equation, making travel time reliable.
Web demos / conference calls are fine for some meetings, for short meetings or to address a particular query, but no replacement for visiting a prospect / client when pitching for business. Personalities and rapport are just as important as technical speak and know how which is very difficult to create unless you are face to face. It also demonstrates your willingness and desire for the business by taking part in person – so there is no real alternative.
Public transport – namely trains and then taxis from stations to site costs more than the cost to drive. Sometimes trains are quicker for longer journeys but the worry is reliability and restriction of the ‘timetable’. Once getting to the station destination the clients site could still be many more miles and so a taxi is required. The other consideration is carrying kit: computer, brochures, contracts, proposals, projector etc – this is much easier with the car. Whats the likelihood of getting a seat during rush hour on the train – slim. But getting a train into London and then out to swap lines is a major inconvenience and waste of the working day.
We could all use Public Transport more and will work where the destination is not far off the route. But it should be cheaper, trains should be longer with more carriages, cleaner, have free WI FI and be more regular for it to work…
alexreeves // April 21, 2008 at 7:30 am |
If we are talking about an existing customer relationship, do you think the standard for meetings should be conference call or web demo?
Could we give our customers an Armstrong branded camera, so for software updates and demos we could do over the web with integrated video conferencing? You can get a camera for £15.
Could we also then use something like this for support?
Steve Berridge // April 21, 2008 at 10:09 am |
Wednesday was a trip to Manchester – Centre. I drove 360 miles.
The meeting was a strategic meeting with and existing customer and had to be face to face. The clients head office is actually in Welwyn which is 10 miles from me, so I could have asked them to do the meeting in WGC when they were at head office, due to my 2.5ltr gas guzzler!
The train trip to Manc is a good call. Its Watford to Manchester and pretty quick (quicker than driving). It also means I can work on the train. The cost of my petrol was under £70, a last minute train ticket would be at least double.
Nick Bowles // May 2, 2008 at 12:04 pm |
A webcam works very well inside the likes of webex for customer support etc but as everyone seems to agree there is no substitute for face to face when it comes to sales and relationship building. There is much research on the fact that people buy from someone they like and feel they can trust; not always from the person selling the best product.
Personally I never drive anywhere. Main reason is the lost productivity. I get solid work done on trains travelling up and down the country and yes it can be a pain but I leave plenty of time and havent really been troubled by train delays; except for a very close call at our first Armstrong seminar!
Nick.
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