Map Business Online User Profile: Bank & Finance Professionals

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

Why on Earth would a banking or finance professional use a business mapping software in their day-to-day business?  Based on my experience, the answer is to visualize businesses, conduct market analysis, and inform strategic planning. Technology has forced all businesses to get more creative with their business models; think Uber and AirB&B. Finance pros, just like any other business, are looking for a competitive edge to help them gather intelligence and strategize so they can decide what business models they can support.

Managing Risk

Bankers and finance pros are also busy people. They manage money, consequently their work processes are all about numbers. As in most businesses, key measurements like profits, customer counts, and margins, are supposed to grow. Other numbers like losses, and liabilities are supposed to fall or at least stay manageable.

We’ve found, through client conversations, smart financial managers like to understand where their customers live and where their business customers do business. A visualization of business customers against a map can bring critical awareness to banks. Often bank locations are established based on proximity to their client locations. Banks need to be aware of how their clients conduct business in an area.

Let’s take an example. A few years back I worked with a mortgage company that was managing loans for clients who bought and sold houses to make a fast profit. Mortgage flipping was what they called it. Now, this house flipping process is all fine and good, until it isn’t. The guy I worked with wanted to visualize where a specific real estate portfolio of homes was located and include the average household income of the surround neighborhoods by Census tract. He suspected his house flipping client was flipping buildings at the edge of tough neighborhoods, buying them cheap, and selling them as if they were embedded in the much nicer more upscale neighborhoods.

I’m not sure this was illegal as much as it was duplicitous. But my finance customer needed to really visualize the demographic realities of multiple addresses across several neighborhoods.

We quickly and easily imported the list of properties, including selling prices, and viewed them against an aerial imagery map clearly displaying building foot prints, resale values, and median household incomes in the area. The view was telling, and our banking client was able to more effectively manage their risks associated with this particular as a result.

Maps don’t lie. In fact, maps more often than not, expose the truth.

Market Analysis

All businesses have markets. Banks are no exception. Finance professionals are always interested in exactly where banks are located because each location has specific business banking needs. By pulling in demographic data, industry specific business data, and product data a finance professional can create a business map that defines particular markets for a given area.

A bank with expertise in the automotive business will have interest in viewing where all automotive dealers are located, dealer inventory levels, and perhaps dealer loan activity. A business map can help define market size, lending exposure, and coverage area holes.

Outbound Caller Support

Perhaps a bank wants to sell a cloud-based payroll service across their current coverage area. A good start would be to import a list of all businesses with more than ten employees into a business map.  Compare that list with a list of current banking customers – some payroll service targets may already be existing customers others may be potential customers.  Create a call campaign whereby a call center rep can call prospective payroll clients and track the client responses. Each call center rep accesses the list using the shared business mapping tool. The map let’s the caller view the potential client while also viewing the surrounding area. They can also take notes on each call within the mapping application, exporting the list at the end of each shift.

Business Maps for Banks

Banking competitors can be described through business maps as well. Simply import lists of banks by their addresses. Imported data should include other pertinent bank information like total available capital, outstanding loan portfolio, and the number of teller stations per retail outlet. The business map user can add up to 64 columns of pertinent data.

Business maps for banking should be able to quickly expose saturated markets vs. markets with opportunities.  Analysis maps like this can be applied internally for the banks, or externally for the bank’s client customers. Business mapping can differentiate your services from the competition. Customer quote, “I met with my banker. She showed me a business map of my market area that convinced me to expand the business.”

Map Business Online provides several key features that banks find incredibly helpful:

  • Import and visualize business addresses – Viewing customers, competitors or risk scenarios against various background maps helps banks and their customers understand their business
  • Share interactive web maps – Map Business Online MapShare let’s bank clients share maps created by bank experts at little or no cost
  • Shared map editing privileges – Establish editable business maps to share with clients to encourage feedback on business operating areas. Create expansion and risk scenarios that explore options
  • Drive time analysis – Create drive time or drive distance polygons from a store location.  color shade the area defined by a 30 minute drive time in all directions. Helps bankers get real with retail clients.
  • Market Analysis tool – Calculate distances between locations or add demographic data for multiple critical address locations. Export results out for analysis.

Business Analysis Map

The Future

I’m no banker but here’s what I think the future looks like. As Internet access becomes ubiquitous, future business owners are going to find more and more ways to create businesses, both from home or from traditional work locations. Many of these business will be in non-traditional industries and using non-traditional business models. The world is changing rapidly. Banks have to be open to new ideas and ready to explore new business opportunities. They’ll need all the help they can get to back the winners and politely decline the losers.

Heck, ten years ago I had no idea cloud-based business mapping would be a viable business model. Last week I spoke with a company dedicated solely to cleaning solar panels – nationwide. Locally, we’re seeing traditional farms and dairies change to accommodate new consumer preferences. All of us are watching delivery companies testing delivery drones, while Elon Musk proposes a plan to send hundreds of people to Mars within a decade.

Banks need to stay on top of these opportunities. Business mapping can help by providing a new perspective on commerce, a location-based perspective. By organizing business views geographically and demographically finance professionals improve their situational awareness.

As we face a rapidly changing and unknown future it is important to harness the information you have and anchor it to planet Earth. A business map locks the new, the old and the different, to points on the Earth, where your analysis begins and your business intelligence expands.

Map Business Online – Easy, affordable, advanced and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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Optimized Routing with Time Windows!

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

This week SpatialTEQ Inc. updated Map Business Online to include time windows in its optimized routing functionality. This feature had been requested by many users of our business mapping software, especially users who came to us from Microsoft MapPoint. We believe the time windows enhancements, coupled with the new freely available Software Development Kit (SDK), makes Map Business Online the best replacement for MapPoint on the market today.

Time Windows

We added time windows because some users are routing field techs or clinicians in time sensitive workflows like delivery windows or patient care time-frames.  Many stops on a given route may be allowable at any time of day, but certain stops may be required at a specific times. For instance, furniture deliveries at one location can only happen at 2:00PM, or a certain patient will only be available in the afternoon between 1:00PM and 3:00PM.

Optimized routing functionality in Map Business Online will now include the ability to set arrival time, departure time and required stay duration for a stop. This new time window functionality will allow dispatch managers, drivers, and traveling sales people to more accurately plan, document and share their driving routes. Time estimates by stop will now be included in Map Business Online turn-by-turn direction output.  Users will be able to export estimated time durations per stop in addition to total trip time.

New Buttons in the Route Window

Time-based route functionality is user selected by  simply turning on Trip Planning in the Map Business Online Route options window. Please note the Edit Gear on the Route Window toolbar. Map Business Online users will also find a new button for exporting route files (PDF, CSV, GPX, HTML & ITN formats). Route file export is perfect for saving route information for later review or sharing route data with drivers, managers, or accounting.

Route Barriers

Sometimes the bridge is out or perhaps you never want to drive by your old girlfriend’s apartment ever again. Well, for a while anyway. Well now Map Business online lets you create a barrier around places you’d like to avoid. Map Business Online users will create a polygon defining that avoid area, and reroute around the obstacle or girlfriend, as the case may be.

Be sure to zoom into the avoid area, if you’re too far out the reroute calculation becomes too unwieldy for practical purposes. Now create a map object barrier – a radius or a polygon – around the target to be avoided.

For example, I might draw a polygon, the shape of a crucifix, around Jane’s house. I could color shade that map object blood-red to make sure it’s highlighted and obvious. I could add text to the polygon telling my map audience exactly what Jane did to me. Oh yeah, in the polygon edit box you’ll notice a check box labeled: Set as route barrier.  I check that box. No more Jane! or someone similarly named.

When adding barriers to existing routes, after checking the Set as route barrier box you’ll be asked if you want to recalculate. The route around barrier functionality is a great tool for clarifying routes for field services systems with many traveling employees. it can serve to clarify areas of responsibility.

Routing Time Windows1

Traffic Aware

Map Business Online route functionality with time windows will automatically factor in historical traffic patterns. This will provide extra time for routing legs through high traffic areas at high traffic times. Both historic and real-time traffic information is added to optimized route calculations improving route time estimations and providing the opportunity to recalculate routes through areas that are less obstructed by traffic.

Based on my discussions with Map Business Online customers, below are examples of customer types that will use time windows with optimized routing:

  • Bus transportation route planners
  • Retail store product delivery and shelf/display managers
  • Traveling sales people
  • Fuel truck delivery services
  • Home care and home hospice care organizations
  • Any field service organization
  • Public safety organizations and disaster planners
  • Guys who just broke up with someone like Jane

With this product update Map Business Online once again adds customer requested features to an affordable Cloud-based service at no additional fee. Updates are just part of the deal. No downloads or installations required. You just roll out of bed and start routing with time windows. Because with Map Business Online it is all about customer convenience, no matter what Jane says.

Map Business Online – Easy, affordable, advanced and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

 

 

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Cloud-based Business Mapping for Small Business

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

For people who own or work in small businesses, time and resources are at premium. Obviously, software is a big part of their business – whether they know it or not. Today small businesses use an array of Internet accessed, cloud-based software tools to make conducting business as easy and as affordable as possible.

We all use tools like Google Analytics, Twitter and LinkedIn for free or for a fee.  Some of us subscribe to services like eRelease, WordPress or Join.Me. Without doubt all of us are constantly accessing search engines through web browsers.  Even our phone systems are becoming Cloud services. These Cloud-based tools have gradually become the platform upon which we all conduct business.

Online software tools have streamlined traditional workflows. I used to be a purchasing manager. My career spanned the time of entirely paper-based (1982) procurement process to the web-based workflow (2000). Web software has significantly shortened the typical purchasing workflow. It used to take weeks to source products and services. Today, accurate procurement analysis is often completed in a matter of minutes. Order placement and invoicing is virtually instantaneous, once decisions have been made. Thanks Google!

These affordable and accessible cloud software tools help small businesses to be more efficient and thus more competitive. New Internet-based business models present opportunities for small businesses that were unimaginable just five years ago.

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to keep up. Yet, “Keep up, we must,” said Yoda, just before hand-wave dropping a hot water heater on Darth Maul.

I respectfully recommend the introduction of one more tool that will serve your growing small business very well. Cloud based business mapping software can provide your organization with a new perspective on customer lists, help define market coverage areas, and will inform your strategic plan.

Apply business mapping software to your small business work flows to:

  • Learn more about your customers and their buying habits
  • Explore a variety of market areas and segments
  • Affordably expand business intelligence in support of strategic planning
  • Create a cool shared map that shows where all the best lunch locations are

Customer Visualizations

By importing your small business customer address list and viewing it against a map you will begin to understand the extent of your sales coverage areas. You’ll be able to import up to 100,000 location records per map, more than enough for most small businesses. That initial basic view of dots on map may be enlightening just in terms of displaying customer concentrations. You may find the densest concentrations to be no surprise but pay close attention to the lower levels of customer concentration.  What are they telling you? And are there places with no customers at all? I’m sure you know why you have no customers there. Right?

Business map views will display where your customers are and where they are not. Demographic mapping is just a few quick clicks away adding income levels, ethnicities, age levels, and other critical people-based perspectives to your customer map.

You don’t need to hire The McKinsey Group to develop demographic profiles of your business anymore. Business mapping tools offer this analysis at a fraction of the cost and with none of the endless preparatory meetings. Yawn.

Map Business Online has a variety of map related analysis tools that display your customer data layer and add value to it. Once you’ve considered customer densities try color coding your customer locations by customer type, sales dollars, or some other pertinent detail. Heat maps can be applied to identify areas of greater and lesser activity based on sales dollars or other numeric values. Census tract focus areas can help identify and characterize deep urban pockets of customer coverages.

Think of the different customer related address databases you could bring to this analysis. Ship from locations, ship to locations, customer referrals, retail stores, dealer locations, sales rep locations, and patient locations. The list goes on and on.

Market Analysis

Ok, so you’ve identified a hot-spot. Do you know why it’s a hot-spot?  If you did you could probably find more of them. Business mapping enables the creation of market areas of interest out of zip codes or Census tracts. Any market area of interest will include related data in tabular form. For example, you could establish a list of zip codes for the assigned area, add demographic data and customer sales information. Now your imported data has become a market analysis. Export the data out as a CSV file for use outside of your business mapping tool.

Armed with your market profile, the Map Business Online users can conduct a market profile analysis across the nation seeking zip code areas that match your best customer segmentations. Armed with this information a business might drop a mail piece, try an email campaign, place ads in local periodicals, or send in a sales person. You decide based on your small business model.

Sharing Maps

In a small business, especially one that is growing rapidly, efficient communication is a critical factor. Business managers need ways to communicate effectively – quickly and clearly. Business maps are extremely effective communication tools.

A business map is customizable so that you can highlight your business priorities.  Think of all the places you can display information on a map:

  • Color coded points to reflect customer types, prospects or competitor locations
  • Shaded districts to reflect territories, market areas or demographic opportunities
  • Map legends that display key map details based on your company vernacular
  • Map titles and map text to highlight nice-to-know realities in the field
  • District, point and territory labels appended with referential data for easy and fast decision-making
  • Tabular data sheet views for deep dives into business data

With your map optimized to reflect your issues, try sharing a business map as a web URL. In Map Business Online this is an easy way to generate a clickable link your constituents get via an email or text. We call this Public Sharing. They click and launch a non-editable yet interactive map view. Viewers can query or route on the shared map view, but they cannot edit that map. Subscribers get 100 sharable maps per month at no fee. That’s usually plenty but you can buy more share sessions if you need them.

Users can of course go old school and embed PNG or Jpeg files of static maps into a Power Point presentation, or simply print a wall map. You choose.

Private Sharing in Map Business Online is the coolest of all. Imagine solving a nasty business problem by leveraging multiple departments through one shared and editable business map. Team editing enables cross-group map sharing for collaborative editing purposes.  Direct your finest minds towards problem resolutions using shared mapping tools. Maps inspire ideas, shared maps inspire solutions.

Who Are Small Businesses?

Map Business Online users vary from single person applications, like a sales person, to large corporate user bases, like insurance companies. As you might suspect, small business of all types use Map Business Online to improve their understanding of their business environment.  Here’s a few examples:

  • Dentistry businesses – We get a lot of dentists using Map Business Online for market analysis, expansion planning, and market campaign planning
  • Physical therapists – This is a vibrant business right now. PT’s might use Map Business Online to plan home visits or build coverage territories to minimize business overlap
  • Flower businesses – Not always a small business, florists and floral distribution companies use Map Business Online to plan distribution networks, create and manage sales territories, and conduct market analysis
  • Act! & Salesforce.com CRM users – Lots of lone wolf sales people who use business mapping to plan sales trips, visualize customer locations and track sales
  • ATM Machines – Somebody’s got to do it. These people use Map Business Online to plan routes for cash machine updates, to track existing business locations and to plan for market expansion
  • Bill Board companies – Clearly market analysis is one application, but they also like to map each sign location and include details about each advertising program associated with every sign – and then share the map
  • Marketing consultants – These guys love to share market analysis maps with clients. They’ll often display market penetration by area and product
  • Franchise businesses – Divvying up their zip code territories is always popular with franchise operations, but they have strategic planning issues as well solved by maps
  • Financial firms – Banks and investment firms love to view bank locations and customer locations against a map. They’ll use as much demographic data as they can get to better understand like opportunities
  • Field tech businesses – Plumbers, swimming pool companies, HVAC techs – you name it, field technicians need to plan their routes and visualize where field techs are located
  • Home Hospice & Home Care – Same as field techs above but sharing information about available skill sets, patient care expectations and info about destination quirks, like that big dog you hadn’t expected. MapShare web sharing is critical for shared route tools
  • Call centers – Sizes vary but sharing business maps via MapShare web maps allows zip code look ups for easy and fast market area designations while taking notes on the map
A Sales Map

A Sales Map

Small Business and the Cloud

The fact that a business mapping tool is cloud-based is important for small businesses too. Cloud services keep software prices low and software functionality high. This means small business owners get better efficiencies, advanced capabilities, and easy access to all sorts of software at low cost. And your IT people don’t have to scramble with installations, software updates or server support.

Cloud based services like Map Business Online update map data and demographic data at odd hours. You never even notice the change. And software enhancements are provided automatically – no upgrading required. I’ve been selling cloud software services since 2011 and uptime has been outstanding. It totally beats Microsoft and Apple automatic updates, which I love like I love traffic jams, hangovers, and cleaning up after my dog.

We want to hear about your small business – your business mapping needs, your success stories and your largest challenges. Help us, help you with business mapping.

Map Business Online – Easy, affordable, advanced and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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Exploring the Limits of City Limits

Posted on September 28, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

Any business mapping software worth investing in offers a variety of geographic district layers upon which users can base market analysis, sales territories, or operational planning.  The layers usually include county, state and zip code districts as boundaried object on the map tied to a simple database. One of the additional or premium layers we offer in the full-year or team edition subscriptions of Map Business Online is the City Limits layer.

City limits add value to a business mapping analysis for a variety of reasons. Let’s face it, metropolitan areas are often where business occurs. Unless your selling freshly squeezed Llama milk or cut, split and delivered cord wood for heating the cabin, there’s nowhere near the level activity occurring in rural areas. 

Llama milk aside, city limits alone provide a USA density view of metro areas.  This view can be valuable on a business map. Maybe you’ve imported all of your customer locations on to the map as small blue dots. By including a city limit view, you immediately get a sense of rural vs. urban customers. That’s just a basic visualization but it gives the map viewer a quick idea of product, profit, margin, or donor viability based on living in, near or away from a city.  Zoom into the map to learn more.

The Map Business Online base map provides building footprint detail in many major cities. This detailed or zoomed in perspective adds another aspect of reality to your business map. You could even change the base-map to an aerial image background or if your feeling frisky, something a little more topographic. At any rate, there are options for base maps in Map & Data.

I like the basic map view of the USA background map with city limits turned on, perhaps shaded a cream or light color. It lets the user see the density of urban areas from a high level. Add a transparent state layer for reference. It’s just a click or two of your cursor. Zoom in gradually on the map. You will notice with each zoom level more city areas come into view. Mapping applications automatically filter the data your presented at specific zoom levels to avoid overwhelming the map user with all the details.

In Map Business Online, City limit data means each city is represented by a defined area.  These city areas on the map can be color coded to reflect business or demographic realities. Map users can color codes cities based on the amount of sales sold in the area or users can color shade the cities to reflect population. A basic data count by zip code, city or county can be easily applied as an area shading. You could color code city limits by sales dollars, staff counts, alcohol consumed, or even cats per city. Find some data and color code your city.

City limit areas can be used to create sales territories as well. Franchise businesses might find this useful especially in areas where zip codes are too small to fulfill sales quotas. Cities may be a great option for defining regional districts, while zip codes or Census tracts cover territories.  Census Tracts can be very helpful in conjunction with City Limits especially in heavily populated cities where zip code territories are just too big. Census Tracts can offer a more granular viewing option.

Cities could also be used independent of county, zip code or state territories, as an additional map layer used to display sales results by metro-region. This is handy for depicting activity by metro-regions without impacting actual territory map representation.

Experiment with the City Limits layers. Turn off the background map and just leave the City Limit layer turned on. Color code by sales for 2015-2016.  What does this view tell you?

Import crime statistics and color code arson by city limits. What cities have the biggest arson problem?

FirePhilly

Color code the City Limit layer by household income level or other demographic data options. Use the Data Window filter tool to show only those City Limits where you do business. Save that view. Now filter for where you do not do business.  What do those two views tell you?

Map Business Online includes some extra Public Data with the application – crime statistics, school information and all the USPS zip codes as a point dataset. Business managers all have access (free or paid) to a variety of pertinent data sets that can add value to a business map analysis project:

·         Customer data – Location points by address or lat/lon, sales or shipments per location

·         Industry data – Industry product sales by zip code, industry trends by zip code

·         Competitor data – Competitor locations by address, competitor sales numbers

¡         Google analytics – Sales data by location

Look for data that is meaningful in your business. Don’t forget to explore the City limits data in Map Business Online.

Map Business Online – Easy, affordable, advanced and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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Map Business Online – Easy, Affordable & Advanced

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

Those of us in sales and marketing understand how difficult it can be to tailor the right marketing message for your primary customer. Marketing is a real challenge today. It’s one thing to understand how your product can benefit your user base and communicate that message, but it’s an entirely additional problem to find a way to communicate around all of the noise.

You understand what I mean by noise, right? I’m as addicted to the Internet as anyone but I often long for simpler times when ads were confined to radio, periodicals, TV and bill boards. Today we are overwhelmed with ads. Our minds are continually under threat of distraction. Distraction by phone calls, interstitial ads, remarketing ads, banner ads, text links, email offers, ads on YouTube videos, ads on Twitter, ads on Spotify or Pandora, political ads, online news ads, snail-mail pieces, planes with banners, stadium names, and yes even blog posts. 

What is up America? Maybe we should support a constitutional amendment for a once-a-month no advertising day?  End rant.

Still, we all have a job to do and for many of us it involves asking people to buy a product or service. There are lots of rules about how you should present your marketing messages:

¡         Offer a benefit not a feature

¡         Sell solutions not software

¡         Make sure your use the active voice

¡         Include a call to action

¡         Explain how your product will make your user a hero

“Waterville House of Pizza – because you are a Super Dad. Stop-by today.”

So I ask myself, on a regular basis, “What do my customers really need to know about Map Business Online?”

We talk to many customers in the course of a day, across all channels. For a company the size of Salesforce.com or Amazon.com those communications are massive and to an extent automated. But in our smaller world, we’re able to pay special attention to each inquiry, request, complaint, or compliment.

We had one email last week where a customer requested we “stop sending [him] emails.” It happens. His email was immediately set to ‘do not contact,’ but we discussed the request. Are we too heavy-handed with email? Should we respond? Probably not, because that would be doing exactly what he asked us not to do. A marketing paradox! My point is, here at Map Business Online we take customer contact seriously and consider the impact of reaching out.

Because we offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based product, we only get contacted for assistance by a small percentage of paying customers.  Most users try our business mapping software through the free trial, buy it and renew their subscriptions a year later, without ever contacting us. This, in and of itself, is quite remarkable to me. In addition to being indicative of how the Internet has revolutionized shopping, I believe it shows how truly easy-to-use our software is. Otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with complaints or have no sales at all, when in fact sales have grown exponentially and continue to do so.

It could also be that the Map Business Online price point, a relatively inexpensive $299.95 per year list price, makes the buying decision a rather simple process.   Sales and marketing people, managers, and financial advisers (just a few of our common customer types) can simply purchase the tool and expense it. Even if permissions are required, the Internet makes it easy to research the tool, compile competitive information, try it and justify the expense.

It’s fun when we’re giving a web demo and the customer tells us how easy our business mapping is to use. “This is exactly the tool we require to replace MapPoint. And it’s even more advanced,” a prospective customer said last week.  “That’s exactly the feature we were looking for.”  A salesperson’s dream, selling Map Business Online. 

Advertising tag lines come and go. Some work, I suppose. Some don’t. Tag lines are hard to measure. What I do know is that our business mapping software adds value to customer processes and work flows:

¡        Powerful customer map visualizations

¡         Accountability defined and maintained through sales territory alignment

¡         Market analysis enabled by layering business and demographic data against an accurate map

¡         Derived location intelligence and situational awareness enhancing strategic planning

¡         Cross departmental team collaboration through shared map editing

These business mapping capabilities all contribute significant value to a growing list of corporate and non-profit customers across North America.

But it all boils down to this: Map Business Online – We’re Easy, affordable, advanced, and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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Appending Census Tract Numbers to Your Business Data

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

Business mapping software should allow map users to easily append their imported business data layers with additional and relevant data. This extra data can be demographic, geographic, or general business information that the user imports. In many cases, business mapping is really just a database management tool. As such, it should be easy to use and it should be exportable. It should also be affordable.

This week we received a customer email requesting assistance in applying Map Business Online. The Map Business Online user wanted to import a dataset of locations, append the data with multiple demographic data categories for the jurisdiction associated with each location (in this case Census tracts but it could be County, Zip code, etc.)  They also wanted to assign a Census tract number ID to each location point. Not your grandmother’s business map application. But that depends on how old you are and she is. Never mind. Read on.

In Map Business Online both the full year subscriptions and team edition subscriptions users have access to the premium Market Analysis tool.  This button is available on the toolbar, currently located eight buttons in from the left. It displays as a Target icon.  Market analysis

The first step in our user’s process is to import their business dataset. This is easily done and we have multiple videos dedicated to the plot data points process. The process places up to 100,000 location points on the map and assigns a circular colored symbol.  Users are free to change the symbol or classify the data using color coding, symbol size and symbol options at their discretion.

Next, choose the Census Tract map layer.  Census tracts are just one of the premium layer options available to full subscribers and located in the Premium Layer button – the World Icon just to the left of the Market Analysis Button.  Choose the Census Tracts and click Add to Map.  Once the Census Tracts are available as a layer in the map a user can hover over the Census Tract map layer in Map & Data, click the Edit gear to make that layer transparent or tweak other visual settings.

In general Map & Data provides controls for layer transparency, labeling, map layer look and feel. It also let’s you choose which layers to turn off and on. Map & Data includes tools for combining demographic layers, turning the legend box on and off, and for deleting your draw layer objects. Learn to love Map & Data.

Map & Data opened up for label editing

Map & Data opened up for label editing

Now click the Market Analysis button. Chose the lowest option, the fifth one down – the text says, “Add names and other information from map layer to dataset.”  Click Next to assign your target imported data layer, the map Layer of interest (Census Tracts in this case.) Below the top section you will see where you can select information to append to your data – in this case Census Tracts and two Demographic Data categories.  Once everything is selected click Next to process your work.

The result will add three columns to you imported Data Layer. All viewable in the Data Window. You can now export your data out of the application as a CSV file by clicking the Data Window toolbar’s far right Export Button. This will allow you to access and use your appended dataset  outside of Map Business Online with the Demographic data included.

I liked this customer’s question. I found it blog worthy.  Please let us know what questions you have.

Map Business Online – Easy, affordable, advanced, and we’ll help.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

 

 

 

 

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MapBusinessOnline User – Franchise Territory Manager

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

This week’s MapBusinessOnline user business mapping software profile is a franchise company territory planner.

We often get calls from administrators or managers tasked with setting up and maintaining franchise territory maps. Franchise businesses generally have sales areas that cover all of the USA and Canada. Active territories may focus on major metropolitan urban areas, but the general scope of the maps are typically nationwide so it is important to use a business map with USA wide coverage and a variety of options for map layer alignment.

Franchise companies like to make sure that territories do not overlap.  This is especially true where the franchise area selling rights are actually purchased by franchisees. Overlapping franchise territories are typically not allowed in these cases. It is always a good idea to turn on territory overlap indicators, which will show any overlap errors made during territory creation.  Some companies allow overlap, some don’t but it is always a good idea to be aware of where overlapping territories exist. MapBusinessOnline includes territory intersection or overlap controls in the Map Options of Map and Data.

Territories for franchise organizations are most often based on zip codes.  That is, ZIP codes are used as the alignment map layer. In highly populated urban areas I’ve seen some franchises break their territories down by Census tract. An obvious reason for this smaller territory segmentation is that franchises are often sold by geographic section. The more segments you have, the more franchises you can sell. Selling smaller jurisdictions as franchise territories means more potential revenue for the franchise company.

A territory alignment scheme covering a franchise system often requires two color shades. Green often indicates a franchise area is available for purchase, while red could indicate that area has already been sold or committed to another buyer.  Other color options can be applied as required.

Demographic Data Supports Decision Making

Demographic information is a helpful reference for franchise territories, especially for franchising that focuses on consumer oriented products and services.  One Canadian customer uses MapBusinessOnline to establish remote senior care franchises across all of the Canadian provinces. Franchise sales territory areas were established by postal code while county areas were used to display senior population groups in age ranges for reference.  This combination of two demographic datasets across the territory map helped sell the franchise concept to potential franchisees.

MapBusinessOnline is able to combine demographic data layers – like age brackets. We call these data combinations calculated data columns. Our senior care franchisor combined all the Senior Citizen Population age brackets for ages 65 and up by county. This allowed franchise planners to consider the areas with the largest senior population across both densely and less populated areas by county. Our Canadian home care franchisers also considered household income in their analysis. All demographic categories were visible on the map for reference, either by color-code map layers or by label addendums.

Adding demographic layers to territory analysis means a franchise buyer can export a spreadsheet that displays key demographic data for their target franchise area. This can serve as a base line reference for future growth. It also answers the question, what other areas contain similar demographics to my best performing franchise territories?

Saving Your Franchise Territory Map

It pays to carefully consider how to store and share your franchise territory maps. MapBusinessOnline provides a map Template folder in the save map dialogue process. By saving your master territory map as a map template, you can protect that map from your general audience of map users or co-editing MapBusinessOnline subscribers. Co-editing subscribers may be using the MapBusinessOnline team subscription for collaborative editing of maps.

Use the template map as the master territory map for your franchise business. After creating your base-line territory map, save it and protect it as a template map. Make subset maps from the master template using a “save-as” process. That way, most of your heavy lifting is applied to one master map that nobody else can over-write. MapBusinessOnline Team Edition subscriptions can be set-up if you have users who require the ability to edit maps, as opposed to just view maps.

Franchise

Example Franchise Map by Census Tract

Communicating Franchise Territories

Business maps allow franchise territory marketers to share their territory layout with potential franchise buyers or existing franchisees. Interactive web urls’s provide views of franchise territory maps that clearly display franchise availability along with other business elements. These web links can be shared as they are requested, via email.

Shared maps for view only purposes allow constituents to click on map objects or points, study labeling and other map text, and even conduct spatial queries and radius searches to understand as much as they can about their potential investment. These shared maps can describe who owns which franchise area or they be may be used to show only uncommitted areas. Shared maps encourage faster communication of critical business elements impacting business decisions.

Franchise owners and franchisees use maps to describe and understand their business realities. It’s all part of the business of communication or the communication of business, whichever you prefer.

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MapBusinessOnline access has officially transitioned from Web Browser (Adobe Flash Player) access to the Map App download access.

  • Please download the Map App from the website – https://www.mapbusinessonline.com/App-Download.aspx.
  • After installing the Map App, the MapBusinessOnline launch button will be in the Windows’ Start Menu or Mac Application folder. Find the MapBusinessOnline folder in the Start Menu scrollbar. Click the folder’s dropdown arrow and choose the MapBusinessOnline option. You can drag the icon to the taskbar for a quick launch button.
  • All saved maps will be available through your Map Library Folder, the second button in from the left on the Master Toolbar. (Green File Folder icon.)

Map App access to MapBusinessOnline.com provides enhanced features and a better user experience.

The Map App includes the new Map Viewer app for free non-subscriber map sharing.

Value-Added Resellers – Offer the tool to your customers as a reseller. Make money on training and consulting. Contact us with further interest in reselling MapBusinessOnline.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com for their business mapping software and advanced sales territory mapping solution. The best replacement for Microsoft MapPoint happens to be the most affordable.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or g2crowd

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com or Jason Henderson jhenderson@spatialteq.com

 

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Map Business Online Users – The Communicating Sales Manager

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

A sales manager’s job, like many today, is a job with many hats. Managing a sales department means you’ll be creating and reviewing your sales people’s goals and objectives; you’ll be thinking about new and different ways to improves sales; you’ll be creating reports so the executive team can see what your department is doing; and of course you’ll be talking and listening to your people and your customers.

In my experience as a sales manager, my best days were always the days I got to speak with customers. But those days came few and far between. Usually, my day was like a pin-ball machine game, where I was the pin-ball. I’d bounce from crisis to crisis while trying to implement the latest management team initiative designed to grow sales while putting out some customer related fire.  Too often the critical sales element of communicating clearly with your sales team was put off until tomorrow.

Sales Communication

Communicating with your sales team may seem like a redundant or obvious item on the sales manager’s daily to-do list, but to me it is one critical element of success. Sales, when you get right down to basics, is all about communication. Every day your sales people are knocking on doors, picking up the phone, or sending emails that communicate things. Those communications had better be the things the company wants to communicate, or your business plan is sunk.

Taken a step further, communication about your product and services is going to happen among your customers – for better or worse. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful marketing there is. Believe me. Social media marketing is just word-of-mouth through a million megaphones.  Sales managers need to make sure they communicate effectively. Business mapping can help.

Communicating Through Maps

A sales manager should always look for tools that enhance communication with her sales group. These tools can include daily meetings, efficient emails, setting clear goals and objectives, and regular updates on how the team is performing compared to goal. Business mapping software is one such effective communication tool.

And remember, Communication Avenue is a two-way street. Sales managers must listen more than they talk.  The listening part of communication should be where you spend most of your time. Sales managers who do not listen are destined to be ex-sales managers. I know a lot of ex-sales managers.

One reason to use business mapping tools as a communication tool is because maps can communicate quickly and efficiently. Tools that enable quick and efficient communication of basic sales facts open up the sales manager’s time for more listening. I mean, do you really want to spend 20% of your data reminding your people what their market area of responsibility is?

A Shared Business Map

Picture a sales meeting, either in a conference room or online with all users sharing a screen. The sales manager opens the meeting by sharing a sales territory map showing sales results for the month. All sales territories are displayed in shaded colors against a map of your company’s coverage areas. Monthly sales vs. sales goals are noted and each sales person is asked to speak to their results for three minutes. The sales manager listens, as does the rest of the team.

While the meeting continues, and the sales team absorbs their peer’s experiences, the map communicates critical elements for the sales group:

  • Clearly defined areas of account responsibility – usually by zip code, county or Census tract. Remember – clearly defined sales territories drive accountability
  • Areas of sales overlap. Smart companies acknowledge where their overlap exists. Unchallenged sales overlap can be an efficiency and motivation killer
  • Customer visualization or sales activity by year or quarter with respect to sales goals, or compared to last year. Sales goals lead to sales results
  • Demographic map data related to market size which could unveil areas for potential growth
  • Top three products sold by account – map labels can highlight a variety of key criteria
  • Competitor store or branch locations to remind sales people of business realities
  • Imported layers of prospective customers, color coded by sales potential
  • Sales planning and optimized routing to maximize sales calls while controlling expenses

A good sales manager will transform the account and product discussions into educational communication opportunities for their sales team. These meetings should become the core communication source for sales direction, progress reporting, and customer feedback loops. Because maps communicate basic facts instantly, these meetings communicate more information in less time.  With an advanced business mapping software sales maps can be shared for everyday reference by sales people in the field, home office or call center.

Just remember, maps are for communicating.  As Julius Caesar once said, “I wish I had advanced business mapping right now, damn it!”  Well, we’re pretty sure he said that. He was a forward thinking communicator.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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MapPoint Refugees Do Have a Place to Go

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

As Microsoft MapPoint users continue to turn to Map Business Online for a MapPoint replacement, I thought it might be valuable for website visitors, new users and trial users to understand why Map Business Online is the best business mapping software that very purpose.

Your Sales Territories

We find many ex-MapPoint users used the tool for sales territory management. MapPoint sales territory tools were applied by retail store chains, franchise companies, large industrial sales organizations and even single user sales people.

We competed directly with MapPoint for years; decades if you count our time publishing BusinessMap. As the years passed our finest MapPoint-like feature turned out to be sales territory mapping. Carly Simon wrote a song about it – Nobody Does it Better.  You will find our territory tools to be intuitive and robust. Users like the option of importing existing lists of territories or creating territories by selecting counties, states and zips incrementally.  The tool includes an easy-to-use territory adjustment button as well as overlap display, which means any areas you’ve pulled in by accident are quickly identified and adjusted.

Color shading is fast and easily amended for color differentiation across your subject area. You’ll find controls over administrative jurisdictions for fill, color variation, boundary thickness, transparency, and labeling.

Map Business Online allows the territory map user to easily aggregate sales dollars and other numeric values from your data imports into territory labels or jurisdiction labels. The tool also lets users append included demographic data layers into the very same labels or pull demographic data territory analysis.  Your territory maps quickly display areas of responsibility, coverages, and demographic realities.  Export reports as required. Drive accountability into your organization through territory mapping.  Look for further territory enhancements in the near future.

Visualizing Your Business

Then there are those former MapPoint users who just want to see their customers against an accurate map of the USA, Canada or the UK. Map Business Online provides an easy dataset import. Place your customer or prospect lists on the map. Symbolize and color code as necessary.

Spatial and data filtering queries may be applied to your imported data to create marketing campaigns, mailing lists, periodic sales targets, or routing stops. You can choose to aggregate imported numeric data values into jurisdiction or territory labels as required. Think – posting sales results on a shared business map.

Map Business Online integrates with both Act! and Saleforce.com for easy CRM data imports.

Demographic Data Included

Map Business Online includes a comprehensive array of Census Bureau sourced demographic data layers. Ex-MapPointers can conduct demographic analysis on business areas of interest. Multiple demographic layers can be imported into your market analysis and arrange geographically and exported out as .csv file reports.

Map Business Online nationwide geographic layers including city limits, counties, 5 and 3-digit zip codes, Census tracts, MSA’s, and states can all be color shaded based on demographic themes.

Metropolitan Statistical Areas

Metropolitan Statistical Areas

Route Management

MapPoint user got used to a huge variety of route tools during MapPoint’s heyday.  Many of those advanced fleet management features are only available in advanced database products like Esri, Route Smart or Telogis. Bring your wallet and your Dad’s wallet. But Map Business online does provide optimized routing for up to 100 stops per route. The routing tool will present turn-by-turn directions, and estimated times and mileages for your trip. Best of all, routing capabilities can be shared with non-subscribers through Map Business Online interactive web MapSharing.  Your map viewers can create their own optimized routes with up to 100 stops.

We’ve also added a new SDK, a software development kit that can programmatically automate data imports and exports, and also includes access to calculated optimized route stops. you are going to need a programmer to use the SDK. Look for more routing enhancements in the near future.

Map Sharing

MapPoint refugees realize maps are for sharing. Map Business Online make map sharing easy and affordable whether you want to print large wall maps, share jpeg files, or link you team to interactive web maps of your sales territory map. It’s all there. You can even share maps for collaborative editing between full subscribers with Map Business Online Team Edition.

Oh yeah. and there is one more thing Map Business Online has in common with Microsoft MapPoint – more than our competitors. We’re affordable. If you find a more affordable solution please send me  a link.

So the next time you find your 30 something son weeping in the basement over MapPoint’s demise, turn him onto www.MapBusinessOnline.com. He’ll be out of the house before you know it!

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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What We Did with Our Map Business Online Summer Vacation

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Geoffrey Ives

Map Business Online software developers have been busy this summer.

Map Business Online Desktop

Map Business Online business mapping software is now available as a desktop option. Let’s be clear about what we mean by “desktop” option.

The standard version of Map Business Online has always been accessible through common web browsers – Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer (Edge), and Safari. I’ve used Map Business Online on Opera too. There’s real convenience in being able to access business maps from a browser based application:

  • Access your maps from anywhere
  • Software updates happen automatically
  • No need to dedicate huge chunks of desktop memory to business mapping
  • Tinder notifications are right there in the same browser (I kid!)

However, we have listened to a segment of users who do not particularly enjoy using browser-based tools. For these people we have released Map Business Online Desktop.

Map Business Online Desktop is still a cloud based software, it just doesn’t use a web browser to display Map Business Online. Map Business Online desktop works on both Macs and PC devices; it works even on tablets. It does not require Adobe Flash Player to render the maps. All of Map Business Online standard features are included in Map Business Online Desktop.

If you already own a subscription to Map Business Online you can simply download the tool and give it a whirl. On the MapBusinessOnline.com website you’ll notice a new tab for “Desktop.” Or just go to: https://www.mapbusinessonline.com/Desktop-Map.aspx

Let us know what you think.

Demographic Data Update – 2014

You may not have noticed but in late July we quietly updated our demographic data options. The US Census Bureau has released a 2014 update which is now included in Map Business Online. With this update we’ve added categories including: Marital status, family increments, household increments/details, and household income.  No Canadian or UK demographic updates at this time.

To quickly view demographic data options in Map Business Online conduct a radius search and click the Summation Button – Summary.

The Software Development Kit (SDK)

We’re now including a data and routing SDK. Use this software development kit to programmatically access data from within Map Business Online for use in third-party software. You’ll need a programmer on your end to do this, so make sure your favorite developer is available and willing. You’ll find information and a download here: https://www.mapbusinessonline.com/Map-SDK.aspx or look for the SDK tab on the website.

Let us know how you use this valuable tool. We’ll be adding more features over time.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

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