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.
"I have had the pleasure of using MapBusinessOnline for the past 5 years and it is an excellent and affordable tool for my clients. I am a franchise consultant, and many of my clients are just starting to get into franchising. The first main question many of them have is they don’t know the demographics around their current location, so they don’t know how to create territories for their franchisees. I am able to easily utilize MapBusinessOnline to draw a prototype territory around their existing location, do a deep dive into the many different demographics that MapBusinessOnline offers, and help the client determine the basics of their new territories, including mileage, population, household count, purchasing habits and age distributions. This tool has been so helpful that many of our clients obtain their own accounts as they begin to sell franchises and grow their business. Thank you, MapBusinessOnline, for providing such a helpful tool that is affordable and easy to use!"
Colette Bell
Director of Business Development
SMB Franchise Advisors
Billy Taylor of Stop Hunger Now, one the world’s great nonprofit organizations said:
"Thanks for the great product, I use it all the time in our non-profit."
Billy and his team use MBO to create regional lists from their organizational data. MBO is a great data segmentation tool supporting market analysis. Users can segment data geographically and append a variety of data layers to exported results.
Billy Taylor
Director
Stop Hunger Now
"I have been using MapBusinessOnline for about 8 months and couldn’t be happier with the services it provides. I have employees and myself who map around 250 routes monthly for our sales team. The interface is easy-to-use and the abilities are exactly what I need. My sales team finds the maps and step by step routes easy to follow and accurate. My store lists change every quarter and the uploading system allows me to quickly upload a new list and categorize the account by priority using colors and shapes. I have also used the heat mapping capabilities and found those easy to customize and quick to use. As with any advanced software, this does take a week or two to learn the more complex features, but it is well worth the time invested. This is the software I would have designed if I was to create one myself. Great job!!!"
Bill Hanavan
Director of Operations
Strategic Retail Solutions