Chances are, by now, you understand the importance of integrating location intelligence into your company’s arsenal of sales tools. Utilizing location intelligence and sales data mapping will undoubtedly help optimize your sales team’s productivity and efficiency. But which mapping tool will be the best fit for your company?
If you are looking for data visualization and mapping tools, Salesforce Maps (formerly MapAnything) may be one of the candidates on your list. In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know about this mapping software including features, pricing, how to add it to your Salesforce CRM, and what alternatives might be better for your team.
What Is Salesforce Maps Exactly?
If you’ve looked into mapping tools previously, you may have heard of the location intelligence tool MapAnything. Well, in early 2019, MapAnything was acquired by Salesforce and, in late August 2019, became Salesforce Maps. This brought together the geo-spatial capabilities of MapAnything with a robust sales CRM that many people associate with Salesforce.
Salesforce Maps is a location-based intelligence tool, accessible on mobile devices and built for global enterprise-level teams, designed to help optimize sales processes and optimize territory management. The platform allows you to go from territory planning and design to execution by your reps in the field and visualization of the results.
Top Features:
- Visualize and manage sales territories: manage specific geographic sales territories and divide territories up by your Salesforce CRM data, including geography, new or existing customers, product requirements, customer revenue, or sales type.
- Visualize sales data on a map-based interface: You can visualize revenue, rep activity, and other sales metrics within the sales territories on a map-based view, helping you make location-driven decisions.
- Create sales routes: You can create optimized sales routes, based on the defined sales territories, that will give reps the fastest and most efficient way to visit specific customers and prospects.
- Find nearby accounts on the map: Your sales reps will be able to find other nearby accounts along their route to help fill in gaps in their day as needed.
- Prioritize reps’ prospect visits: Create a 7-day sales schedule based on Einstein® Score or Pardot® Score.
- Share and collaborate: View the schedules, routes, and territories via exchange-based calendars and maps on desktop or mobile devices.
Salesforce Maps Pricing
More than likely, you are also wondering about Salesforce Maps pricing. The thing to keep in mind is that when you are evaluating the cost of Salesforce Maps, you also have to take into account additional costs outside of the mapping add-on itself.
To effectively use Salesforce Maps you would need to have the Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, to begin with. And Salesforce Maps is an available add-on only for the Professional Sales Cloud version and above, it is not available for the Essentials version of Sales Cloud. The Sales Cloud CRM platform runs $75 per month/per user for the Professional version, $150 per month/per user for the Enterprise version, and $300 per month per user for the Unlimited version.
The Salesforce Maps tool itself has two levels of features and pricing for your team depending on your business and sales needs. There is the Basic version and the Advanced version:
Pricing for Basic Salesforce Maps
The Basic version of Salesforce Maps will cost you $75 per month per user, billed annually. This version allows for:
- Sales route optimization and route scheduling
- Visualization of your Salesforce CRM data
- Auto-Assignment of leads based on location within territories
- Mobile access
Pricing for Advanced Salesforce Maps
Alternatively, the Advanced version of Salesforce Maps is $125 per month per user, billed annually. This version includes the capabilities of the Basic version plus:
- Advanced priority scheduling of routes based on business rules and constraints
- See data trends (including external data) with thematic mapping and territory layers
- Route planning beyond a single week at a time
Salesforce does offer a free trial of either version so you can determine if the add-on would be a good fit for your company before jumping into the monthly investment.
Pros & Cons Of Salesforce Maps (MapAnything)
Salesforce Maps may work perfectly for one type of business or sales team’s needs and not be the right fit for another. As with any type of software, Salesforce Maps does have pros and cons to its platform. Here are a few of both:
Pros of Salesforce Maps
- You can visualize many different aspects of your sales data, including customers and sales revenue, on a map-based interface.
- Create balanced sales territories more easily and give all of your sales reps a better opportunity to consistently hit their numbers.
- View a robust dashboard with important info all in one place, including the number of check-ins this week, average time on site, the number of generated opportunities, and more.
- Create optimized sales routes that not only show the distance between customers but also travel time.
- With mobile accessibility, your sales reps out in the field can quickly update and add to customer records as well as find other customers nearby to fill in gaps in the day.
- Direct installation and integration to the Salesforce CRM to maintain the consistency and completeness of your data.
Cons of Salesforce Maps
- The platform is somewhat limited in what you can do with it compared to other mapping tools. For example, even though there is a good amount of sales data you can visualize, it can be somewhat challenging to accurately view your sales pipeline activity within a territory since the platform does not include deals tracking.
- The mobile version of the application is limited in comparison to the desktop version — sales reps out in the field do have some mobile capabilities but would still have to complete certain activities back in the office from the desktop version.
- It is not as easy and intuitive to adjust the sales routes for special cases like cancellations, new appointments added, or meetings outside the sales territory.
- Does not offer as much demographic data along with the geographic data compared to other mapping tools. This means it does not provide as much ability to uncover new prospects and opportunities within existing territories based on customer profile capabilities, as the application focuses on existing customer data.
- It does tend to take a while to set up, configure and customize to your sales team’s needs.
- Because it is focused more on use by sales managers/sales ops, there is a higher learning curve for the use of this tool in the beginning — it can take some time to get used to how to efficiently use Salesforce Maps and all of the features within this platform.
- Salesforce Maps (and the Salesforce CRM) is highly customizable, which can make it even more confusing for sales reps and managers. Plus, it was designed for use by all sales reps, not specifically outside sales.
- It is more expensive compared to alternatives — at a minimum of $75 per month, Salesforce Maps is more expensive than other options of sales mapping solutions.
How To Add Mapping To Your Salesforce CRM
Adding a mapping tool to your Salesforce CRM is not impossibly complicated, depending on the specific tool. Some are easier than others to integrate.
When it comes to Salesforce Maps, Salesforce does provide some instructions to try and help with the installation and configuration. How to access the Salesforce Maps app in Salesforce is simple. You can easily purchase the tool within the Salesforce AppExchange to add it to your account.
To install Salesforce Maps after purchase, Salesforce has outlined these easy to follow steps. Keep in mind that after you install Salesforce Maps, the installed package appears as a trial for up to 72 hours.
The important thing after installation will be to ensure your Salesforce Maps application is configured properly for use by your sales team. Initial configuration does take some time but once it is set up, the platform can help streamline most of your reps’ sales activities.
To help with configuration, Salesforce has put together this in-depth video series that will walk you through the initial configuration setup.
Because Salesforce is one of the most widely used sales CRMs, many alternative mapping tools have also made it very easy to integrate their platforms. For example, Map My Customers allows for seamless syncing between the two platforms, keeping your sales data clean and consistent.
Alternatives To Salesforce Maps (MapAnything)
Read The Best Alternatives to Salesforce Maps (aka MapAnything) for a comprehensive look at popular options that can enable your team to be more productive and effective than ever.
Utilizing Mapping Tools To Optimize Your Salesforce
By now, you know how important territory mapping and data visualization are. As you can see, there are a variety of tools available that allow you to integrate both of those things with your Salesforce CRM.
When trying to decide on what mapping tool is best for your team, it is important to select one that provides you all of the necessary functions that will fully optimize your sales team out in the field; without holding them back. Ease-of-use, especially while your reps are on the go, is critical.
Take the time to analyze exactly what your sales reps need in a mapping tool, its compatibility with your CRM, and the cost of the tool itself in comparison to the return on investment it can provide (through improved productivity and efficiency). Optimize your sales team today with a mapping tool that is a perfect fit.
