Maps Add Value to CRM, Help Sales Managers, Reps, and Marketing
What do you think of when you think of maps? Vacations, treasure hunts, weather forecasts?
Maps do more than display a place or show how to get from one place to another. In sales and marketing, for example, maps let you conceptualize spatial relationships more easily than with rows and columns in mind-boggling spreadsheets in which intelligence often lies hidden. Even better: When combined with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, mapping reveals CRM data, graphically and color-coded, with street and satellite images.
Eighty percent of a company's data has a map-related component. Because maps let you easily visualize spatial data, you can quickly identify growth opportunities to gain market share.
What can sales mangers do better with maps added to CRM?
- Manage sales territories more efficiently: Reviewing customers and/or prospects by territories displayed on a map often reveals the need for changes in territory assignments and balanced territories.
- Know where sales reps are and what they're doing and, accordingly, if necessary, manage them better for more productive calls. For example, in cloning “A” accounts, mapping with CRM will help to get “B” players to better focus on core customer accounts. And the mapping-and-CRM combo can increase the adoption of CRM, itself, allowing users to achieve the results they expected for their installed CRM’s.
- Help assure that reps are most productive while they're travelling; for example, on a map, you can see a point for every won or lost opportunity. You might be surprised to find that a rep has not targeted companies in a particular area for some time. Although you could look at the data in a table, a map makes the data more visible, jumping out to you for making better decisions.
- Easily evaluate competitive risk by seeing and understanding where competitors have penetration in your areas. Determine a plan of action with customers that might be at risk.
What can sales reps do better with maps added to CRM?
- Save time in planning trips by coordinating travel time to see other customers and prospects.
- Find all customers and prospects in a particular area: Let’s say you are travelling to location X and want to visit customers and prospects in a radius of, say, 10 miles of that location. With a map inside CRM, you can easily make callbacks and work out appointments to visit all nearby key customers and prospects.
- Filter sales calls by specific CRM data (such as sales per year and number of employees), build a radius around a call location, and spend time setting appointments with higher valued targets. Because not all customers or prospects are created equally, you need to ask, "With limited resources, where do I spend my valued time?"
What can marketing do better with maps added to CRM?
- Create targeted marketing and advertising campaigns by cloning your best customers.
- View markets, customers, prospects, competition, dealers, and competition more effectively than wading through spreadsheets.
- Visualize business data (such as sales volume or the date a customer was last contacted) on a map with different symbols, pie charts, and polygon areas.
- Enhance cross-channel communication and share intelligence throughout your company.
- Streamline the start-to-finish marketing process, at lower costs and with more qualified leads.
- Gain a competitive edge by more promptly acting on opportunities and resolving challenges via mapping and CRM, rather than simply reacting via CRM without maps or just a static spreadsheet.
- Determine the best location for a new branch or center.
Bob Sullivan is president of InfoGrow Corporation (Cuyahoga Falls, OH). Bringing 24 successful years of experience in CRM, mapping, lead management, business intelligence, and B2B market analytics, InfoGrow helps clients identify their best prospects, discover missed opportunities, focus reps on the most profitable accounts, and reduce marketing waste. Learn more about InfoGrow at www.InfoGrowCorp.com, or call Bob: 800-897-9807, x224.
