The paper maps of the past are gone, and sophisticated mapping and routing technology is available in Salesforce to help with inefficient field teams, the lack of geographic visibility in data, and manual territory management. These different map-based apps can help you uncover efficiencies, build better processes, and take decisive action to drive growth.
In this article, we’ll uncover how to add mapping & routing to your team’s Salesforce arsenal to optimize performance. Specifically, we’ll walk you through how to develop and execute a geo-intelligent strategy to increase your team’s productivity.
Below are 14 game-changing capabilities you can start using with Salesforce today to grow your business, categorized under Location Intelligence, Field Mobility, Sales Enablement, Territory Alignment, and Route Planning.
Field Team Mobility
1. Put Salesforce Data at Your Reps’ Fingertips With Mobile Mapping
Some of the most frequently used and useful mobile applications in the consumer market rely heavily on maps. Google Maps, Uber, Yelp, Airbnb, Zillow, and Strava all leverage maps combined with data to create value for their users. Similarly, maps combined with Salesforce data in a mobile application can help field sales teams perform better.
Mobilizing Salesforce data with maps equips your reps with the customer data they need in the field, displayed in the way they need it – on a map, right on their phone. It also provides managers with the tools they need to oversee and assess field rep performance.
Reps can mobilize their CRM and get optimized routes right on their phone, decreasing busy work and minimizing time behind the wheel. They can also capture more data into Salesforce, equipping Managers with the information they need to make better decisions.
Reps can quickly update records, sync their route with their schedule, check in and out of appointments, all from an easy-to-use mapping interface. With maps, you enhance your reps’ activities with a tool that’s compatible with their mobile workflow.
2. Capture More Data from the Field Directly Into Your CRM
You unlock the value of your CRM when you continuously capture data from the field. This, in turn, helps the Marketing, Operations, and Management arms of your organization make strategic, data-driven decisions that boost business performance.
The challenge is that reps are busy and constantly on the go. They often struggle to update their CRM, particularly when it’s on a desktop, because it’s not conducive to their mobile workflow. They write down notes, hoping to transfer them at the end of their workday or week, and then either fail to do so or fail to capture important customer details. With a mobile mapping app, you can enable your sales team to gather data from the field without leaving the activity or workflow they’re already in.
Capture more data from the field with customized check-ins and determine what Salesforce fields you would like to have filled out as a part of the automated check-in process. Reps can even take notes using speech-to-text and have them sync automatically with Salesforce. With increased mobile data capture, organizations using maps with Salesforce can gather up to 50% more data back into CRM from their field team.
With the additional data gathered from the field, managers can make more data-backed decisions to help grow their business.
Enable Your Sales Team
3. Equip Sales Reps With a Map Made for Prospecting
Uncovering new leads is an essential part of growing revenue. Mapping software allows you to quickly and easily map new prospects in your geographic vicinity and find new leads you may have otherwise missed. By applying filters, you can narrow down prospects in a restricted geographic area and hone in on which ones have the greatest sales potential.
Lead generation on a mobile device specifically recaptures more efficiency in the field when there’s a disruption to a rep’s route or plan. If there’s a customer cancellation or even unexpected traffic, a rep can search for new leads along a given route and build efficiency back into their day.
4. Enact Best Practices and Compliance With Location Check-Ins
Often, not enough data is captured into the CRM to help Sales Managers gain insights into their territories and effectively monitor their teams.
Check-in and reporting capabilities enable reps to report what, where, and when things are happening in the field. With a mobile mapping app, notes are time, date, and location-stamped automatically, allowing managers to quickly run reports and ensure compliance amongst their reps. With verification, mapping check-ins become a critical component of the effective management of field teams.
5. Automate Mileage Calculation for Expense Reimbursement
When reps spend time on administrative work, they lose time selling. Calculating your mileage ‘by hand’ with Google Maps and a spreadsheet is a surprising time sink for someone who is driving around visiting customers in the field all day. Automating the tracking and accounting of their mileage reimbursements is an easy way to take work off their plate and maximize their time selling.
Mapping features in route planning software can be especially useful in that they double as a mileage calculator to give you an accurate depiction of driving distance, all at the touch of a button. Reps waste time when they rebuild their routes in Google Maps to prove their mileage accounting. Right from the mobile device, routing software verifies mileage and enables auditing by capturing the location where check-ins occur. With easily verified mileage, you can drive your team’s efficiency and increase their time doing things that move the needle.
Location Intelligence
6. Find the “Where” in Your Data
Location intelligence empowers business leaders in sales, operations, and marketing to develop data-driven growth strategies. The “where” in your team’s business intelligence gives you a map of your business data. This is critical to assessing how to efficiently deploy your team’s resources and make better decisions.
To better understand the location-based aspects of your business, an intuitive mapping interface is the most important tool in your strategic toolbox. It allows you to quickly overlay your customer and business data on a map and assess where you should do more or less. You can then test out different scenarios to satisfy your business objectives. Heat maps and Choropleth maps (the ones where the color changes in an area to reflect what’s going on there) are particularly impactful ways of synthesizing customer data, field team activity, and performance metrics into one visual that lets you quickly assess and optimize what resources are being allocated and to where.
Apart from business performance, mapping visualization tools also provide valuable geo-based insights into your customers, ranging from revenue size, industry, employee count, last order type, last order date, patterns on product penetration, or cross-sell upsell opportunity in an area. Most companies don’t have geographers on staff, but location intelligence tools give you that level of understanding. When viewed on a map-based interface, these types of insights enable you to better assign leads, deploy resources in the field, and tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience.
7. Focus Your Team’s Sales Efforts
Sales Leaders and Sales Reps can use mapping tools to make decisions about where they need to invest their time to maximize revenue. Interacting with data on a map can give you a better understanding of your customer data and deeper insight into which customers are the most valuable.
Mapping tools that allow you to filter your customers by Einstein score, potential revenue from leading indicators, last interactions, or physical proximity to an address enable sales reps to optimize where and how they spend their time.
Managers can go deep into the data and call attention to priority accounts for reps to follow up with. Reps can also use the tools to uncover opportunities in their territories by highlighting top-performing accounts or filtering new prospects with the highest lead scores.
More information in the hands of your sales team, like where nearby reference customers are to a potential prospect, is an easy way to help your team close more deals. Sales teams that take into account map-based insights about their territory and customers close more deals.
8. Make Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
Do your ads in certain areas with identifiable characteristics perform better than areas without those characteristics? Should we increase our marketing spend evenly by population, or should we increase spend in certain cities more than others? Which ones?
Without a location-based understanding of your customers, your marketing team is flying blind. Marketers can miss valuable opportunities to reach new and existing audiences while taking their geography into account. Marketers can use maps with other parts of the Salesforce marketing suite, such as Pardot, to optimize and customize their marketing efforts.
Marketers can overlay their customer data with external market data, such as property and demographic information, to gain deeper insights into their existing customers and devise targeted campaigns & tactics. Data mapping tools can also help Marketers find and target new leads, ranking them with Einstein or Pardot Scores to identify the most valuable opportunities.
Experiment with creating a list of customers that live within a 30-minute drive of a store location, add them to a Salesforce Campaign or static or dynamic Pardot list, and then send them customized invitations or marketing emails. Marketers could also push their newly created dynamic Pardot list to the Salesforce Engagement Studio Program to set up triggers, enforce rules, and take action on their communications.
Aside from targeting, mapping analytics is useful for helping coordinate marketing activities across different geographic areas. For example, Marketers can calculate the total dollar value of all open opportunities in an area and then determine an appropriate place to hold a marketing event. Or they could invite everyone within a certain geographic area and with certain characteristics to an event based on their industry or Einstein score.
From field marketing to campaign messaging, mapping analytics can help Marketers develop a data-driven strategy to drive growth.
Align and Design Sales and Service Territories
9. Optimize Your Territory Alignment
Territory Alignment software builds out territories for field sales or field service people. For example, if you have 150 reps across the country, you can build 150 fair territories that are balanced on the number of accounts, the amount of revenue the territories are currently producing, the geographic size of the territory, and the new business potential of the territories.
The foundation of a successful field team is having territories that serve the objectives of your business. When done in a spreadsheet, creating compact, fair, and balanced territories is a tedious process that often results in inefficiencies and inequitable territory assignments. Alignments can quickly become outdated with the addition of new employees or customers, leaving members of your team stretched and your customers dissatisfied.
Territory planning software can help you automate this process and drive efficiency in your business. By enabling you to visualize and analyze your sales or service territories, map-based visualization and analytic tools help you assess your territory alignment against your team’s performance and develop optimized territory models. You can test out different spatial scenarios, adjust alignments, and deploy changes on the territory or account ownership back to Salesforce in seconds.
With the input of custom metrics, you can tailor your territory design to your specific use case. Factor in rep skill set, seniority, workload, or availability into your territory assignments, or take into account territory revenue, legacy accounts, and active opportunities to create an alignment that maximizes sales performance.
Thoughtful, data-driven territory planning can be the difference between a successful sales team and one that struggles. Getting your sales team balanced, fair territories that no one has to fight over will generally result in a 5-7% lift in revenue.
Lead Routing
10. Geographically Assign Leads
If your reps have physical territories, you can’t just “round robin” new leads the way you can with an inside sales team. Someone needs to look at which territory a new lead is in, determine which rep owns that territory, assign that lead to that rep, and then notify the rep. It’s impossible to do all this fast enough manually for reps to get back to customers quickly – and over 78% of customers will go with the first company that responds.
Salesforce users can leverage map-based lead assignment technology to get the new leads into the rep’s hands automatically and instantly, so that they can respond to the new leads faster.
Admins can also create assignment rules based on lead attributes like company size, opportunity size, product type, or industry. This way, you can not only respect physical territories, but you can also do things like send all leads of a certain size or in a certain vertical to a particular rep. Or you might want to divide a territory into large and small deals and have two reps share one geography, but split the deals up by size.
If someone in your company is looking at each lead as they come in to decide where it should go, this is an easy way to automate a very annoying task and take it off their plate.
Route Planning
11. Plan and Optimize Your Routes in Minutes
Route planning software enables sales & service reps to spend less time planning, sitting in traffic, and zig-zagging around town due to poor planning. By optimizing multi-stop routes, reps can save time, gas, and money while reaching more customers in the field to close more deals.
Mapping out customer data specifically helps reps strategize how they route and plan their day, and focus on the accounts and leads that matter most. Advanced Routing software further enables them to use business rules such as visit cadence, time windows, and account prioritization to automate route planning for up to four months out and inject strategy into their daily schedule.
With routing software on their mobile device, field reps can change, update, and optimize their routes when they’re on the road. With a mobile route planner, reps can respond to cancellations or disruptions quickly and recapture efficiency by finding meetings or accounts nearby. They can also generate new leads in a given area when they’re out in the field. Reps using route planning apps see an average of two more customers or prospects per day and boost their sales by up to 20%.
12. Dispatch the Right Rep to the Right Place at the Right Time
Dispatchers and Fleet Managers have a unique challenge in weighing a host of variables to determine how and when to deploy a rep or asset in the field. Mapping optimizes their ability to dispatch the right rep with the right skills, inventory, and tools to service the right customer, all at the right time.
Specifically, it facilitates the decision-making process by incorporating the rep’s real-time position, the rep’s homebase, territory borders, and customer location all into one easy-to-use interface. With a real-time view of a field team, Dispatchers and Managers can quickly and efficiently assign new service calls and improve customer service.
The ability to schedule routes based on constraints and business rules like visit windows, SLA’s and other priorities that you can identify in your Salesforce data allows Managers to strategize customer assignments. Build out your team’s routes in advance wherever possible and maximize your team’s overall efficiency.
Mapping is inextricably linked to the efficiency and effective management of your fleet or service team.
13. Respond Faster With Live Location Tracking
With live location tracking, Dispatchers and Fleet Managers can better identify problems, manage assets, optimize safety, and save on expenses. Live Tracking can answer questions like “Where are our trucks?” or perform actions like “Notify me when a truck is 10 minutes or two miles from a location.”
Live tracking is yet another mapping tool in your strategic tool belt. Managers can calculate time on site, automate follow-up communication, quickly update work order status or check-in/check-out requirements, and monitor traffic congestion, all to maximize their team’s effectiveness in the field.
For the tracking of assets, they can confirm on-rent vs off-rent inventory based on the asset’s location, locate misplaced or lost assets, and proactively schedule maintenance based on performance data.
With fleet vehicles equipped with on-board sensors, location tracking can help capture all miles driven and build reports for mileage tracking and reimbursement.
With a broad range of features, live location tracking puts more information and control in the hands of your Managers and helps drive real-time strategic decision-making.
14. Stay ‘In the Know’ with Automatic Notifications and Geofencing
It can be complex to keep track of your assets and optimize their usage. Mapping apps on Salesforce allow you to not only know the exact latitude and longitude of your assets, but you can also get automatically informed if policies aren’t followed.
Enforcing policy about where things can go is not always easy to do, but geofencing can give you a management edge by ensuring assets aren’t traveling outside of their zones or territories. Receive an alert when there’s a breach in geographic boundaries like state lines, country, or zip codes.
Geofencing is a mapping feature that will allow Managers to gain greater oversight of their resources. And you can protect privacy by easily toggling Live Tracking on or off based on work status.
Next Steps
This article has discussed how managers, analysts, executives, and field reps benefit in 14 ways from a combination of using Salesforce Maps and Badger Maps. These two add-ons extend Salesforce’s capabilities in different ways, and many organizations will find that various roles and jobs will benefit from each of these apps. Some roles will benefit from using the different capabilities of both apps.
Badger Maps focuses on field salespeople using maps and routes on their phones, territory management, and lead routing. Salesforce Maps is focused on deep map-based analysis, marketing decisions, dispatch, and management of field service and trucking assets, and fleet management. Both work seamlessly with the rest of Salesforce’s capabilities.
Unlock value from your Salesforce data and enhance your processes with mapping tools. The mapping capabilities covered here are a great place to help your business save money and increase revenue today. Between Salesforce Maps and Badger Maps, Salesforce users can unlock the “Where” in their CRM data.
The Author
Patrick Cronan
Patrick is the Founder & CEO at InVisory.
This Pardot article written by:
Salesforce Ben | The Drip
Lucy Mazalon is the Head Editor & Operations Director at Salesforceben.com, Founder of THE DRIP and Salesforce Marketing Champion 2020.
Original Pardot Article: https://www.salesforceben.com/14-ways-to-use-salesforce-mapping-and-routing/
Find more great Pardot articles at www.salesforceben.com/the-drip/
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This Pardot article written by:
Salesforce Ben | The Drip
Lucy Mazalon is the Head Editor & Operations Director at Salesforceben.com, Founder of THE DRIP and Salesforce Marketing Champion 2020.
Original Pardot Article: https://www.salesforceben.com/14-ways-to-use-salesforce-mapping-and-routing/
Find more great Pardot articles at www.salesforceben.com/the-drip/