When was the last time you looked at a map? Chances are it was probably pretty recently.
From ride sharing, to food delivery, to figuring out what to do on a Friday night, maps help us make decisions all the time. By visually analyzing the distances around us, and the options available within those distances, they can instantly provide much more information than just text or lists can.
And it can do the same thing for your sales strategy. Through the use of geolocation and mapping, there are loads you can discover about your sales territories and customers that spreadsheets or other kinds of visualizations might miss.
In this article, we’ve broken down how to determine if sales mapping would be helpful for you and your team, its beneficial functions, what to look for in a sales mapping software, plus some of the top options to choose from.
Is Sales Mapping For You?
Simply put, if you’re putting addresses into your sales CRM, the answer is probably yes. But consider the following factors as well:
- If your team focuses on outside sales, sales mapping will provide key insights that are intrinsically relevant to what your team does every day.
- Does your team have or use any physical, tangible maps in your office? A software solution can help you modernize your operations and save time.
- If your team is assigned sales territories, the visualizations and user interface will make managing or reassigning them a breeze.
- Did your sales team previously use Microsoft Streets & Trips or MapPoint?
- If your team focuses on inside sales, but you’re interested in geographical data that can help you better understand your customers, sales mapping does just that.
Do any of these benefits sound good to you? If so, read on to understand just how you can achieve them.
The Beneficial Functions of Sales Mapping Software
To summarize how sales mapping software works, just visualize your spreadsheet or CRM form fields overlayed on a geographic map.
Sales mapping allows you to geographically visualize where your prospective and current customers are and how they’re distributed across your target territory.
But unlike just plopping addresses into Google Maps, one of the real values of sales mapping is when you apply various filters to analyze your opportunities. This means making sure that you’re collecting as much data about your customers as possible in your CRM, so these can then be used as filters in the future.
From company size to industry type to the many other important details you need to truly paint a portrait of your customer’s needs, it’s crucial to make sure your form fields are collecting the right information, that this information is accurate, and that this CRM data stays clean.
A fun tool to help you discover the kinds of geographical segmentation available is City Data.
Let’s look at sales mapping through the lens of a common sales team needs to further understand what kinds of analyses and functions are possible for you:
Sales Mapping For Lead Generation & Relationship Building
By collecting demographic data about your contacts, you can pick up on trends through filters in your sales mapping–such as learning that one kind of industry is particularly receptive to your product in one kind of area–and then searching for similar leads to contact there.
If your sales mapping tool is integrated with a lead finder, finding new leads can be done easily. And they can then be quickly assigned to the appropriate salesperson based on the territory they’re in or their particular customer focus.
Similar to this is looking at your customers by their position in the pipeline. Pinpointing leads that are in need of more or less support can help your sales team more efficiently plot their daily routes to nurture as needed and build stronger relationships.
Sales Mapping For Customer and Territory Insights
Much like lead generation, applying filters to your active clients can reveal more selling opportunities. Or you can use it to anticipate challenges or resource bandwidth issues.
A filter to consider is urgency level. By viewing the status of your clients filtered by the last time you’ve contacted them, or by the kind of last communication, you can easily prioritize and hit your most important customers with ease.
It’s also a crucial way to understand how assigned territories are performing or if any leads are outside of those assigned territories altogether. This can help you redesign new territories or understand how to adequately invest in the areas that are overperforming.
Sales Mapping For Team Management
No one likes a poorly balanced sales territory. If it’s too small, the rep won’t get enough opportunities or challenges to keep them happy. If it’s too big, your morale will be busted through stress and burnout.
With sales mapping, you can easily compare assignments between your salespeople so that all leads and customers are fairly distributed. Redistributing leads or customers can be done easily with a few simple clicks. And by keeping them in similar areas, you’ll also help keep travel costs low as different kinds of leads can be maintained at the same time.
Making these maps fully visible to your entire team can also help with transparency and accountability. This eliminates any ideas of favoritism and can encourage poor performers to pick up the slack (which means less micromanagement for sales managers, too).
Features To Look For In Sales Mapping Software
So now that you know what you can do, it’s time to find the tech that does it. But not all sales mapping software is designed equally. To pick the most beneficial one for your team, there are some specific features to look out for as you peruse your options:
- Mobile-friendly: An app or an extremely easy-to-use in-browser portal should be a mandatory feature, especially if your team specializes in outside sales.
- Route optimization: A huge reason to invest in a sales mapping strategy is in the travel savings you can get by making your sales routes as efficient as possible. Modern software should make optimized route planning easy and intuitive.
- Automated check-ins: Good software makes life easier, not harder. Many aspects of manual data entry should be eliminated in truly modern sales mapping software options–and a great example of this is the ability for reps to to automatically log client visits in real-time.
- Enhanced visualizations: Heat maps, color coding, or other visual signals are great time savers. There also should be a way you can export them into presentations or to easily share within your team.
- Automated lead generation: As we mentioned above, sales mapping software can help streamline your team’s lead generation efforts and reduce the amount of time needed to do it effectively. This is especially true when the software offers automated lead generation capabilities even when you’re out in the field (like you’ll find with the Lead Finder feature in Map My Customers!).
- Reminders and reports: Make sure to consider the kinds of automatic sales activity reminders and reporting capabilities the software offers.
- Integrations: It’s crucial that whatever solution you choose works with your preferred CRM software, like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Dynamics.
9 Top Options of Sales Mapping Software
Now that you know exactly what to look for in a sales mapping software, it’s time to start evaluating several good options. Taking a look at a couple different ones will help you pinpoint which one may be the best fit for your team.
Here are 9 top options in sales mapping software to consider:
Map My Customers
As a powerful all-in-one software solution built for today’s field sales rep, Map My Customers offers much more than just sales mapping and route planning. The platform checks all the boxes for the necessary features we covered above and more, empowering your reps to truly simplify their day, maximize their productivity, and optimize sales effectiveness.
Map My Customers provides valuable workflow tools (including the Smart Planner), robust mapping capabilities, in-depth reporting, and easy-to-use team management functions. Plus, as a mobile-first tool, all of these features can easily be accessed from your mobile device while out in the field.
Map My Customers also offers native, out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Zoho.
Badger Maps
Badger Maps is a field sales mapping software that also serves as a sales planning app and personal routing app. The platform helps outside sales reps map their customers, leads, and opportunities within their territories and optimize their route planning efforts. Badger Maps also enables reps to improve their prospecting efforts by being able to select their prospects by industry, overlay them with current customers, and visualize new business opportunities.
It is important to note that Badger maps does not offer the type of in-depth team management functions that you will find in some of the other options. So, it is a better option for the solo field sales rep.
Sales Rabbit
For door-to-door, B2C sales teams who are looking for a sales mapping and canvassing software, SalesRabbit is a great option. This platform helps teams optimize sales efficiency and effectiveness by enabling them to geographically visualize customer data, view exactly which houses have been visited, track leads easily, and report on and monitor sales progress in real-time.
SalesRabbit also empowers sales to more effectively manage the team’s sales activities and territories.
Spotio
Spotio is another good option for door-to-door sales teams that are selling to residential consumers and looking for a field sales engagement platform. This software centralizes all of the team’s sales data and activity, provides route optimization within defined territories, enables you to build visual sales pipelines, and more.
Spotio meets a range of sales mapping and territory management needs, enabling outside sales reps to increase their effectiveness and sales leaders to optimize team tracking and management efforts.
Salesforce Maps
For sales teams using the Salesforce CRM (Salesforce Sales Cloud), Salesforce Maps is a location intelligence tool that is available as a native add-on. This tool was built to help optimize the sales processes and territory management for global enterprise-level teams. Salesforce Maps enables managers to quickly and easily define specific sales territories for each of the reps and ensure that time is being spent where it matters most to capitalize on the best business opportunities. Reps can also utilize optimized route planning capabilities for their territory.
The Salesforce Maps platform can be great when used inside the office. But, compared to other software options, once reps are out in the field, its capabilities are somewhat limited.
Geopointe
Another software option for effectively mapping sales data is Geopointe. This mobile-friendly platform enables teams to geographically visualize their sales efforts, gain valuable insights, begin to streamline processes, and improve their sales effectiveness.
By location-enabling your CRM data, Geopointe allows reps to visualize the customers and prospects within their territory directly on a map. They can then utilize the sales route planner capabilities to help automate their multi-stop route planning efforts. With its data visualization and filtering functions, sales managers can also get a bird’s-eye-view of their team’s sales data and activity.
Mapsly
For sales reps who purely want a basic mobile mapping option, Mapsly is a good choice. This geo-intelligence platform can be used within its desktop platform but is light enough to be used solely from a mobile device.
Mapsly provides a way for sales teams to add automation capabilities and location intelligence to their CRM (or other IT system). It enables users to view contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects on a customizable geographic map, while also offering sales territory management, customer record search by distance, a sales visit planner, routing planning, and more.
GeoMapper
For those teams using Hubspot CRM, GeoMapper is a sales mapping tool that can be easily used without having to leave your CRM. This easy-to-use, native Hubspot integration provides data visualization and sales mapping for businesses and enterprises of all sizes.
Reps can quickly narrow down customers on a map, seeing only the wants they want by using a variety of filters, and pinpoint where their sales efforts should be focused. Lists of customers or prospects that are made in the GeoMapper tool can then be easily imported into your Hubspot CRM.
Mapview
Mapview is a data mapping software built to help sales professionals locate nearby opportunities, plan visits, and map any type of data, from leads and accounts to competitor locations and more. This platform brings all of your team’s maps, contacts, and calendars together in one place.
In Mapview, reps can keep their territory data organized with customizable groups, map pins, and filters. Plus, the route planning features help reps optimize their productivity and get to their destinations smarter and faster. The platform also offers task lists, prioritization, follow-ups, automatic emails sent log, and more.
Maximize the Effectiveness of Your Team’s Efforts Through Sales Mapping
Sales mapping software will enable you to bring your sales strategy into the third dimension and maximize your team’s sales success. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, an effective mapping tool can combine dozens of analyses and functions into one interactive platform, turning lines of information into your very own treasure map.
As you can see, there are some great options available for mapping software. But make sure to look for the valuable features that we mentioned above. This will ensure you select one that will not only optimize your team’s mapping strategy but help streamline processes and maximize effectiveness as well, even on the go.
Try out a couple different options of sales mapping software and start empowering your team for consistent success today!
