Integrate Business & Sales Mapping with Your CRM Software

Business Maps Encourage Cross Department Problem Solving

Because a business map is intrinsically tied to physical reality, it acts as an Earth-base model organizing and displaying disparate components of your company’s operations. Business maps serve up comprehensive data layers of customer locations with sales information, competitor locations with product focuses, and untapped market areas of interest with supporting demographic information. Such data layers work together with a world-wide interactive map to display your business’ field of influence as a shared map view.

As an example, business maps can mashup CRM data, accounts payables information, and operation efficiency data in a way that lets departments share their various perspectives and actually solve problems together. Further, business maps lend themselves to sharing – shared web-map URLs, printed wall maps, or even live web-share demonstrations for constituents in widely spread-out locations, are all effective ways to communicate real business intelligence quickly and effectively. And always make sure to secure feedback.

Imagine an online meeting where you are sharing business intelligence by having your team view a comprehensive spreadsheet. Now imagine the same online meeting where a colored, interactive business map is used to pull together critical customer locations, demographics, and key concepts. Which approach do you think will be more effective? (Hint - It’s the map approach.)

Visualizing business operations, market areas of responsibilities, and business opportunities against a map encourages quick communication of key concepts. Business mapping is the last mile that drives utilization into that CRM project you implemented and accountability into the sales pipeline analysis everyone is complaining about.

Beliefs and the Spectrum of Self-perception

Every employee carries their beliefs to the work place. And each work place encourages a set of beliefs. Beliefs are filters through which the human mind assesses reality. A person’s beliefs impact how they perform in their job assignment. To an extent, a person who believes she’s a winner will tend to win arguments, contests, and even sales orders and contracts. A person who believes he’s not a winner will tend to lose orders a little more often than average. Who knows by how much such beliefs differentiate your employees? Maybe a self-perceived winner will get the order 20% more often than the self-perceived loser? We just don’t know because there is this spectrum of self-perception.

Sales results are often impacted by luck or by factors out of our control. Sales results are driven by economic factors, customer spending allowances, the weather, and a host of issues we can’t control but must at least understand. A good sales manager will consider the spectrum of self-perception and roughly where her people fall along this spectrum. The sales team will perform better when the majority of associates fall closer to the positive, winning side of the self-perception spectrum.

There’s a danger in implementing new business systems that track associate progress closely. A new CRM system, outside sales training, and pipeline management tools will often be sold to the sales team as an investment the company is making in the team. But we all know the investment wouldn’t even be considered if the team was performing to expectations. So at some level, at least a few of your employees will tend to view the new tools as a threat to their job, perhaps even a threat to their career. These beliefs can push associates who lack self-confidence to the negative end of the spectrum. A self-fulfilling prophecy that could very well short circuit their employment.

Introducing business mapping to sales planning provides a new perspective on the sales pipeline. Business mapping software is extremely affordable so the tool needn’t be passed off as a significant investment. In fact, the tool is simply an additional aid to help the sales team plan better, and to encourage collaboration on territory and sales pipeline management.

You might say, "Management realized that all the software and expertise we purchased to get our arms around our sales projections missed one important element. That element is that each one of you are different people with varying beliefs, organizational skills, and selling skills. We’d like to use this mapping tool to visually represent our sales theatre and work together to form an understanding of how our customers purchase product, how our products fare in the market place, and how our team projects sales activity. This shared business mapping visualization tool will help us learn from each other."

The Hop to Business Mapping Software

Business mapping software is a hop for your business, not a giant leap. We’re going to use the tool www.MapBusinessOnline.com to describe building your shared territory map. There are other tools available.

To visualize customers on the business map you will simply import address-based spreadsheets of your customers and prospects, easily exported from a CRM system, into the map system. You will also utilize existing knowledge of sales territory assignments. Those territory assignments could also be simple Excel spreadsheets of zip codes assigned to sales reps, which can be easily imported. You could also just bring your general knowledge of the territory assignments to the business map and build the territories from scratch using a digital lasso tool – your mouse curser.

Web-based or cloud-base business mapping software is accessible from any web browser. Once your paid and registered all you’ll need is your email address and your password. It’s a good idea to play with the software a little to get used to the interface, but it’s not necessary.

Make decisions about how your territories will be constructed:

• What geographic district layer makes the most send for your business – Zip codes, counties or states? Most often it’s 5-digit zip codes. But for nationwide distributor sales networks it could be states or counties. You decide. They are all handled the same. Each territory must be made up of just one layer. You generally can’t mix counties and zip codes in one territory.
• What defines the size of your territories? Two common size determinates are sales revenues and population. Think about what gets your sales people most easily upset and that’s usually the measure. Population tends to be more of a determinate for consumer companies. House hold income is often applied to consumer sales as well. And, in MapBusinessOnline, you can use all three determinates if you like. These data layers will be appended to your territory scheme to provide a check on territory size – to make sure that territories are fair and balanced.
• What geographic perspective will assist the most for defining your territory areas? Here are some options you might consider as guides for creating your geographic boundaries:
  • A density view of your customers – Import your customer list and define territories based on where the customers are located. In some cases, this perspective makes territory boundaries obvious. Consider symbolizing and color coding the customer location points by revenue or revenue potential
  • How much drive time do you want to allow your sales people? By associating drive time polygons on the map that roughly define territories you can control the amount of time your sales people spend behind the windshield
• Does your business allow territories to overlap? Territory overlap or intersection is a setting in MapBusinessOnline. Some companies allow overlapping territories, some do not. The territory overlap option displays overlap as a Red area. The color is adjustable. This helps in two ways: 1. It defines allowed or disallowed overlap so that company rules are adhered to, 2. It displays possible errors in your territory creation giving you an opportunity to immediately fix territories assigned in error.

Keeping the concepts noted above in mind, you can now start creating territory maps.

Sales Territory Alignment

Especially if you liked the idea of splitting up territories based on customer revenue, it’s a good idea to start this process by importing your customer list. Simply choose the Plot Data button on the tool bar, currently five buttons in from the left. Navigate to your customer data and import it. Make sure you have separate columns for address, city, state, and zip. This will accurately place those points on the map. Now you have a visualization of your customer base.

Use the Map & Data box to adjust your territory options – transparency and overlap are controlled here. Click the Edit Gear on the Map & Data tool bar to edit the territory options.

If you have a preassigned list of existing territories assigned to zip code, county, or state you can easily import and create your territories. Use that next button to the right – a red puzzle piece. Go grab your data and pull it in.

An alternative to importing territories, and possibly the most popular method for creating territories is using the polygon search tool. Just left of center on the MBO tool bar are the search data tools. Click the drop down and choose the polygon search tool. In the Map & Data box make sure the geographic layer you prefer to use for territory creation is checked on. Zip 5 codes are most often selected but you could use states, counties, MSA’s, Census tracts, and zip 3 codes.

Run your polygon search through a designated area of zip codes. No need to be perfect, cleanup is easy. The completed polygon searches the zip code layer and asks you to name the territory. The data window now pops open and you can see the data Map Business Online automatically assigns to your zip code territory.

Whether you’ve imported your territories or created them by hand you will see those territories listed in the Data Window data drop down right beneath the geographic layer they are assigned to.

The Data Window Button

Now is a good time to adjust the territory data assignment, transparency and overlap. Here’s in the data window view of your territory, in the lower right section click More Data. This opens the MBO data management tool. You can remove automatically assigned data (select and move left) and add your own imported data or included Census demographic layers (drop down, select, and move right.) This data assignment will apply to all new territories created using zip codes on this map.

Now, go to Map & Data, your check box list of data layers, and click the small toolbar’s Edit Gear. Choose the Territory Options tab. Here you can set territories to transparent (great for viewing supporting map back ground data) and allow for overlapping territories to be displayed in Red – or the color of your choice.

Back in the territory map view you can selected zip codes incrementally and remove them or add them to the territories you’ve create. Hold the shift key down to select more than one. This is how you clean up your territory process. It is also another way to create a territory, simply select a zip code (county or state works the same) and hold down the shift key, gather all the areas you want and click that Blue puzzle piece icon that follows your selection around. Name it and you’ve created a territory through incremental zip code selection.

One more popular approach to territory creation in MapBusinessOnline is to generate a drive time polygon search and use that polygon to collect zips for a territory. This approach can actually connect your sales people’s windshield time (drive time) to territory size and sometimes that is very relevant. This was the choice a large, USA insurance company made to support claim agent coverage areas.

To recap, the above ten paragraphs outline the territory creation process in Map Business Online. We’ve got more detail and videos, but quite frankly, it’s pretty straight forward. Once the territories are created you’ll be able to append critical data like sales goals, progress against goal, and other key information that drives your business. From there, with your territories defined and tweaked to your satisfaction, you can share those maps with your sales team or problem solving teams.

Critical Sales Territory Management Functionality

With your territory map completed and saved in MapBusinessOnline the following basic capabilities will be in place for your sales team:

• The ability to visualize all assigned territories associated with zip codes (counties or states)
• All territories will include associated and appended data layers as determined by your team
• Discrete territory views are selectable – you can isolate and view one territory at a time
• The ability to query account or prospect data by territory, save and export
• The ability to generate comprehensive lists of all territories and associated zip codes

If you also have hierarches or regions, you’ll need to build those areas in the next level of administrative district up. In our above example case, use zip codes for territories and counties or states for regions. Territory administrators can export out data reports by individual territories and by the overall territory scheme. The team will be able to search customer and prospect database by territory and export those files out of MBO for use in third party applications.

Appending Sales Goals and Sales Results

The critical function in using territory maps for more accurate sales projections is map sharing. It is important that your sales team share their goals and results. Sales results sharing leads to a common desire to excel throughout a team. Exceling as part of a team requires and instills accountability. And because the team is sharing goals and results, strategy and tactics will become a critical component of the ongoing conversation.

A sales organization should strive to share all strategies, tactics and trends on a regular basis. This is important. Winning strategies come and go. Sometimes, a new strategy can suddenly occur, it can make a whole year’s quota in one month, creating success for the whole team. Those are good years when that happens. An example might be, maybe when one sales person is notified by a buyer that a certain competitor is shutting down a product line. Your business can leverage that private conversation, that no other competitor Is aware of yet, into a winning strategy. That strategy might include adjusted sales presentations, organic and paid Search Engine Optimization adjustments, and product development focus. Sharing pulls opportunities into the light and drives strategy.

Goals and results tend to be monetary in nature. Include sales figures and sales results in your imported customer address databases. Simply add additional columns to the imported data you use in business mapping. Consider these data visualization options you can now include in your shared territory map:

• Color code customer points by sales dollars
• Color code customer locations by ship from location
• Aggregate quarterly sales dollars in territory labels which could also reflect individual goals and results
• List key product objectives by account using flexible label fields
• Reference key demographic data in zip code, county or state labels
• Show drive time polygons around sales people’s home bases to help clarify travel issues
• Include additional datasets like competitor locations, customer corporate headquarters

Ask your people to listen to their customers for new ideas or trends that might be displayable on a map based on location based datasets.

Use Your Business Vernacular in Territory Map Displays

Every business uses its own terminology. Although most of my customers use English, it is as if each business uses a business language all their own. Sales categories are a great example of what I mean. Some companies might just have Customers and Prospects. Other divide their accounts into specific and critical categories like:

• Master accounts, house accounts, end users
• Distributers, resellers, national accounts, buy and resell accounts, retailers, chain stores
• OEMs, manufacturers, professional accounts, large businesses
• Manufacturers Reps, consulting firms, design firms

You get the picture. My point is that your business mapping application should reflect your business terminology so your people respond appropriately. Use the sales territory mapping software to edit your imported data so that your customer categories, business channels, product offerings are used as labels on the map. By incorporating your particular business lingo your people will more easily adjust to shared territory map views.

We see all kinds of business territory maps. Some are nationwide coverage areas with a variety of business or product sales groups. Others are small regional business maps that might focus in on several counties. Either way, you should match your territory map to your organizational requirement. Small businesses may be able to get away with just one map view. Large businesses may want to create several maps, perhaps for various product line distribution networks, or perhaps one map for product allocations and another for revenue projections.