Daily Use of MapBusinessOnline Exposes Sales Opportunities for Timber Wolf Forest Products

Background

Timber Wolf Forest Products, Inc. is a fine wood components manufacturer in Caldwell County, North Carolina. The company sells to high-quality furniture and cabinet manufacturers throughout the United States and Canada, providing them with beautifully designed and fashioned wooden legs. These magnificent wooden legs are found on cabinets, bureaus, desks, shelves, and a wide assortment of wood furniture.

Will Hartley is the Timber Wolf National Sales Manager. Previously a regional sales manager for Snap-On-Tool franchising, Will ran his own business for sixteen years. Will used Microsoft MapPoint business mapping software at Snap-On and brought that experience to Timber Wolf, where he has worked for the last eight years. In the meantime, MapPoint was canceled by Microsoft, so Will turned to www.MapBusinessOnline.com for a cloud-based business mapping software he could use to support marketing to the woodturning industry.

The Challenge

At Timber Wolf, Will’s challenge is significantly increasing sales for this high-end wooden furniture and cabinet leg provider. Specifically, Will is tasked with marketing to the company’s existing customer base and considerably growing that customer base through sales prospecting. This entails finding and selling to all potential wooden leg customers across North America.

The Solution

Will is very much an advocate of business mapping software as a customer and prospect organizing platform that can support sales and marketing teams. Upon arrival eight years ago, Will subscribed to MapBusinessOnline as a business mapping alternative to Microsoft MapPoint. One of his first tasks was to view Timber Wolf’s 600 customer addresses against an accurate map of North America.

Will and his associate symbolized and color-coded their existing fine-furniture customer list to reflect the exact type of business these companies transacted.

Together they turned their MapBusinessOnline subscription into "an organization tool, identifying regions of business opportunity." His maps show various symbols, colors, and shapes to denote:

Commercial cabinet builders;
Residential cabinet builders;
Millwork companies;
Home wood shops;
Other.

Timber Wolf Customer Map created using MapBusinessOnline

With an existing customer base visually established over a USA map, Will used MapBusinessOnline to help identify regional success areas for Timber Wolf Forest Products. By studying the business purchasing habits of his existing clients by area, Will targeted similar but undeveloped regions across the USA. Over time, Will’s team used Google searches, yellow-page lookups, and other business data sources, including MapBusinessOnline business listings, to develop regional prospecting lists across North America. Will stressed, “We researched the names of all businesses that buy wooden legs.” MapBusinessOnline organized prospects and customers into a map visualization and contact database. A Timber Wolf sales associate was assigned to verify prospect list accuracy, address by address. “He calls prospects from that growing list all day, every day, using MapBusinessOnline as a guide,” remarked Will. Customer accounts on the prospecting map are color-coded green; prospect accounts are color-coded blue. In this way, sales planning maps can reflect a class of opportunity.

Timber Wolf Prospecting Map & Route Map used to organize day-to-day sales prospecting activity

Will stands by his tested prospect search, verification, and outreach sales process. Once verified, each account was contacted by phone for permission to receive a mailed Timber Wolf product catalog. Without exception, the catalog invitation was accepted. Over the next few years, the customer/prospect database proliferated from 600 to over 16,000 active customers. Each customer is symbolized and classified on a MapBusinessOnline customer map.

The Results

Will Hartley and the Timber Wolf team have grown sales exponentially, expanding the business through daily prospecting and sales outreach. They’ve used MapBusinessOnline creatively for contact management, prospect visualization, and efficient sales planning.

At Timber Wolf, MapBusinessOnline has been used for various support services that supplement their sales process:

Optimized Routing - Develop optimized traveling salesperson vehicle routes, with forty or more daily stops at existing customers and prospect accounts. Access maps views of on-route prospect accounts for additional stop-off and cold call locations.
Customer Visualization - Create classified and color-coded customer map visualizations for planning, selling, and forecasting purposes. Prospecting phone calls are made each day based on map-directed business intelligence.
New Market Analysis – The sales team develops a demographic and business analysis of existing customer sales by region, exposing potential new market areas based on successful sales in regions with similar demographics and firmographics.
Business Listings – While MapBusinessOnline business listings were not the only source for Timber Wolf’s very niche prospecting requirements, the tool does provide access to a nationwide database of businesses, searchable by area, name, and industry look-up.

Timber Wolf and Will Hartley have established and managed a vibrant and lucrative client and prospect list by leveraging the power of business mapping software. Timber Wolf’s use of MapBusinessOnline speaks to the advanced analysis capabilities any business can access today due to the advent of cloud-mapping services.

About Timber Wolf

Timber Wolf Forest Products, Inc. is the industry’s foremost source of fine wood components. We offer over fifty years of experience in woodworking to high-quality furniture and cabinet manufacturers. We strive to build exceptional value for our customers. At Timber Wolf, our customers know they can depend on us for consistent, high-quality parts, reliable, on-time delivery, and a great price.

Timber Wolf is an industry-renowned wood manufacturer known for the critical sanding process as the foundation for superior finishes. We are accustomed to complicated patterns, including roping, twisting, fluting, shaping, and carving.