As a new sales manager, Buddy Woods needed to make sure he understood how his customer base is distributed across the USA. He also wanted to make sure his sales associates had ready access to the same information. After all, knowing your customer is a critical element of selling.
Problem: A sales manager desires a broad map visualization of all customers across the USA to share with his staff. He’d like them color coded or symbolized to reflect customer type and he would like to include labels noting 2016 Sales, Key Contact, and Phone number.
Solution: Import a customer address spreadsheet into business mapping software, such as MapBusinessOnline. Include a column for customer type: house account, bio tech, distributor, and reseller. Adjust labeling options through the import process and using the color code by symbol button choose or import a symbol of your choice.
Buddy first job was to sit down with his best technical sales people and make sure the data was available. It required a little bit of clean up and a few more location components to the data. His predecessor had only required ZIP codes location data. Buddy knew that was problematic for data accurate visualizations. If he imported only ZIP codes onto the business map he’d get multiple points piled on top of one another.
Our sales manager asked his admin to collect and update addresses for all customers. That way he’d see an accurate distribution of all customer across the map. MBO allows importing up to 250,000 records per map.
With the data cleaned up Buddy let his admin import the data into MapBusinessOnline.
With the customer data on the map, Sales Manager Wood’s administrator chose an appropriate symbol for all customers and color coded and sized the symbols to reflect customer type. Color coding points is easy, starting with clicking the Color Code with Symbols button:
Data point color coding can be easily adjusted by simply revisiting the process.
Buddy made a few suggestions and in short order his map was done and his customer visualization was ready to be shared. Buddy used MBO MapShare to publicly share his business map customer visualization through interactive web maps with his sales team. With MBO for teams, sharing is included in the subscription.
Buddy’s team, for the first time, could easily click on an MBO map link and see the entire customer breakdown. They were able to look up customer records by name or ZIP code, query customer contact info and view other data that Buddy shared.
Now that’s a sales team.
"MapBusinessOnline has played a major role in helping us to expand. It has helped us successfully map out our territories so that we know where we are and where we can be. With a clear picture of where we are, it has helped make it easier to locate available territory for our new Franchisees. MapBusinessOnline has even helped us keep our guarantee and carry out its promise for a five mile protection radius for each Franchisee. MapBusinessOnline has not only given us a map of where we are now, but it has also given us a map for our future."
Sine Schirmer
Franchise Support Department Head
The Tutoring Center Franchise Corp
A leading provider of automated storage and retrieval systems, Kardex Remstar has a multi-layered distribution network in North America. Mapping regional sales territories and sales districts using ZIP codes and states. Kardex Remstar tapped into MBO territory creation services to make the process quick and easy. Detailed ZIP code tables were converted by MapBusinessOnline into multiple maps describing their distribution network, sales coverage by customer segment, and product maps.
"The product is phenomenal and the support even better."
Sales Manager
Kardex
"MapBusinessOnline is an amazing tool that I use every week. When you are creating zip code footprints and trying to determine what zip codes fall within a range of a business, this tool couldn't be any easier to use. There's actually so many functions that are great but specifically I use MapBusinessOnline to create either a mile radius or a drive time radius from a business location. I then use that radius to determine which zip codes fall within the radius. Why is this important? Because I then export the zip codes and use another software that gets me exact counts of how many people fall within that radius in those zip codes. It's Amazing!
I highly recommend this software!"
Chris Farcher
The Mailworks
Account Manager