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.
MVP Sports Clubs is a sports and health facility management and development company with operations in Central Florida and West Michigan. MVP uses MapBusinessOnline to construct demographic map profiles of a radius surrounding each of their many sports clubs. Such market analysis helps MBO users develop a better understanding of their business which makes strategic planning more effective.
"MBO users develop a better understanding of their business which makes strategic planning more effective."
Mark Hope
Business Manager
MVP Sports
This leading North American reseller of hardware and software supports millions of businesses worldwide. We get regular calls from SHI representatives who need to offer a MapPoint replacement or to simply provide business mapping software for a corporate or government account. SHI customers include users of annual subscriptions for the USA and Canada as well as collaborative Team Editing subscriptions for corporate accounts.
Software House International (SHI)
"MapBusinessOnline one of the most powerful tools I have as a Regional Channel Manager. It’s a difficult task to visually represent the vast amount of data that I have to present to my customers and team members. MBO makes it easy to represent, configure, and manipulate the data on to an effective map. A picture is worth a thousand words, and MBO allows me to create a perfect picture."
Ed Ku
Regional Channel Manager
ABB