MapBusinessOnline newsletter – June-July 2015

Ascend356 Adding Value to MapBusinessOnline in HealthCare

MapBusinessOnline business mapping software is utilized across a variety of vertical markets but the market that most often applying our map visualization tools is the healthcare market. Applications within healthcare vary widely. Hospitals use the tool to plan expansions or simply get a visualization of medical resources across a target area. Home health care agencies use the tool to organize their field staff and supplement scheduling processes with optimized multi-stop routing and patient location visualizations. Insurance companies use the tool to organize marketing campaigns, visualize claims by location, or plan nation-wide events that engage the public.

Enter Tracy Ferren from Ascend356 - http://www.ascend356.com. I first met Tracy a few years back when he called asking questions about how to apply MapBusinessOnline to sales and marketing territory management. Since that time Tracy has become somewhat of an expert on MBO himself. Ascend356 consults with a variety of healthcare related organizations about their field staff requirements, marketing efforts, web-site development, and capital equipment availability.

One element of Tracy’s consulting practice is to provide the tools and process for powerful map visualizations. That’s where MBO comes in real handy. Tracy’s medical customers include medical device companies that sell capital equipment and at times consumables. Tracy sets up map visualizations that display medical facility points color coded by equipment concentrations, all this against a background of territories by county or zip code. These MapBusinessOnline visualizations help Ascend356’s map audience understand coverage areas, assess equipment allocations, and track waste products for disposal compliance. Data layers can be exported from the map for use in third party applications or for record keeping.

Ascend356 also provides a rapid operational analysis that thoroughly assesses territory size by matrix. That matrix can include surgery count, bed count, number of hospitals in a system, or any number of customer selected criteria. Tracy claims, “MapBusinessOnline is a powerful tool that allows me to easily extract, sort, and analyze data by territory, zone, or region.” I would add that Tracy has provided valuable MBO customer feedback and feature recommendations that will become part of the MBO feature set.

There’s almost no end to how map visualizations can help a medical organization better manage their business. Part of the power of MBO is that simple instant awareness that occurs when a human being views a map. Maps connect people and organizations with places, to state the obvious. Once that recognition takes place, additional data only expands the viewers understanding. For instance, when a field manager views Tracy’s map she can quickly understand where the facility is located, what its coverage area is, its bed capacity, and the critical disciplines supported by the medical team.

Ascend Marketing Expertise

From a marketing perspective Ascend356 can provide a soup to nuts solution that goes way beyond mapping. Ascend356 offers web-site development services, SEM and SEO support, as well as general marketed expertise in email and online marketing approaches. And nobody understands how overwhelming those marketing technologies can be today better than I do. SEO/SEM consulting services pay back can be outstanding. We’ve all got plenty to deal with in managing our day-to-day business without have to holding SEO séances that try to predict the impact of the latest Google update.

Tracy Ferren and Ascend356 are consulting engineers adding tremendous value to standard software applications – in mapping and in general marketing. You should call contact them with questions.

We’d love to understand how your business can add value to MapBusinessOnline in a similar way, but in your particular vertical market. Contact MapBusinessOnline and let us know. Sharing our mutual success stories can only benefit our companies in our shared markets. After all, it’s all about SEO today – blog it, Tweet it, share it, and hope somebody clicks on it.

NEW! Shared Map Editing

One of the coolest things about MapBusinessOnline is the ability to share an interactive web map with your non-subscriber constituents. Your map viewers can pan and zoom all over the world, click on data points, download datasets, and even multi-stop route at no charge. But they can’t edit the map.

However, MapBusinessOnline now supports collaborative shared map editing for full subscribers. If you work with a couple of annual subscriber to MapBusinessOnline you can set up your maps for shared editing. Further, if you have a team of five or more prospective shared map editors you can buy a team subscription, get a discount, and manage teams of collaborative mappers all editing the same map.

Why Shared Editing

We’re finding teams of map editors using MapBusinessOnline for a variety of reasons. One is for sales territory mapping. Sales territory maps are a perfect team application. Co-map editors sharing editing responsibilities for territory maps are able to create template maps, and then share territory maps based on those template maps, for information sharing and critical field updates. Allowing field map administrators to share map updates means data updates happen faster and more accurately. Ultimately better, faster shared map updates leads to better, faster decision making. This could be a possible leg up on the competition.

Further, those territory maps share sales objectives for your sales reps to reference and ponder. And because you have editors well placed in your field organization those territory maps can become flexible (that’s your call.) This can help resolve conflicts, depict overlapping areas of interest, and generally keep people engaged in the sales conversation.

Market Analysis is another popular application for shared map editing. Marketing agencies can set up business maps for clients and share them for customer feedback. Such co-editing functionality supports marketing campaign management as well as marketing ad reporting.

Picture a marketing team planning a direct mail campaign. Maps are established that represent the anticipated coverage areas. Zip 3 geographic boundaries are included as a map back drop. Zip 3 projected coverage areas are color shaded. As postal delivery results come in location points or even zip code areas can be color coded to reflect delivery hits. Follow-up activities and sales conversions can be tracked as well.

By sharing interactive web maps both agencies and clients can view progress in near real-time. Customer purchase locations can be uploaded to the map exposing patterns in responses to marketing messages. Maps can provide results analysis based on geographic placement, demographic break downs, and even political leanings.

We noticed some marketing companies use shared maps to analyze marketing activities across various media channels. These activities could include radio ads, newspaper inserts, and magazine print ads. Marketing map templates are created showing planned advertising campaigns across the nation. Map users zoom in view details by target market areas.

Local map viewers can see planned advertising activities in their specific areas, which can impact retail stores and product offerings. Results can be posted by shared editors as necessary. Back at the marketing agency, various departments can access and update maps to derive the information they require to do their various jobs. Sales views results, calling on new clients or following up with prospects accordingly. Marketing plans the next campaign, tweaking messages based on results. While accounting reviews costs and commission requirements. Everyone sharing the same map!

So give some thought to how shared map editing can support you business. How can your team use combine their thinking power to improve your business? Forget two heads; see how much better five heads are. Drive accountability, productivity, and innovation into your business processes with MapBusinessOnline shared map editing.

MapBusinessOnline for Salesforce.com Users

If your business uses Salesforce.com as their CRM, get ready to access MapBusinessOnline for Salesforce.com. We had many requests for this integration and now it is live! On top of all the usual MBO features you’ll get:

• The ability to launch the application and import records directly from Saleforce.com
• A location point tool bar button that launches Salesforce.com contact and account views from within MapBusinessOnline
• The ability to create contact marketing lists in MapBusinessOnline and generate campaigns in Salesforce.com

And we’re already considering the next set of features for MBO Salesforce.com 2.0 – send us your ideas.

If you’re an existing MBO user you can migrate to MBO Salesforce.com is at no charge. Simply go to the Salesforce.com AppExchange and look up MapBusinessOnline. Follow the links to MBO Salesforce and convert. For new users MapBusinessOnline for Salesforce.com is priced exactly the as it is for regular MBO users.

And PLEASE! review us on the Salesforce.com AppExchange so we can let the world know we’ve arrived as a Salesforce.com business mapping option!