Visualize Customers on a Map
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.
Seeing is Understanding - Know Your Customer
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.
Import Your Customers
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. 
- Create an Excel spreadsheet where each row is an address location. Make sure the location information is broken out in separate columns for Name, Address, City, State and ZIP code
- Make sure your column headings are labeled
- Click the Import or Plot button in the mapping application
- Pay attention to confirm address columns are placed where they should be
- Be sure the MBO “Name” field matches the appropriate Customer Name field in your data
- Adjust labeling options to your liking
- Click Plot to place the points on the map
Here’s a slow and easy video explaining how to plot customer records on a business map.
Color and Symbol Assignment
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: 
- Select your data if there is more than one import data set available on the map project
- Check Summary only if you want to summarize by county, state or ZIP code. Buddy does not want to summarize.
- Choose the column of your data controlling color coding
- Choose a range if necessary (for numeric value color coding)
- Choose your desired symbols and adjust size or color as required
- Choose a scheme for No Data in the controlling field
- Click Done or Preview
Data point color coding can be easily adjusted by simply revisiting the process.
Maps Are for Sharing
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.
Learn How Our Customers are Succeeding with MapBusinessOnline
"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
"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
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
Popular MapBusinessOnline features
Build fast map visualizations of your business data
Visualize business data on map with various symbols
Emphasize customers density with heat maps
Create powerful reports and presentations with maps
Share business maps
Share editable maps with your sales force
Print large format map views
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