We’ve heard from our customers lately that fully utilizing Geopointe while grounded and no longer going out on sales calls has become a pain point of sorts. The most immediate/clear use case for mapping Salesforce data like leads, accounts and opportunities is planning sales visits on-site or going out on sales calls. Now that things are shut down and many areas have stay-at-home orders in place, obviously going on visits is not feasible for the time being.
But what if we told you there are still many ways to use Geopointe when not out on sales calls? In fact, maybe there are benefits to no longer being able to travel to visit customers and prospects.
It’s all about changing your mindset: you just need to get a little creative to adapt and innovate.
Geopointe Customer Success Managers have noticed a common question: how are other customers adapting the tool? In such unfamiliar situations, the instinct to look around at what your peers are doing is natural. When faced with the unknown, looking to mirror other people’s behavior is useful for self-preservation.
We’re all trying to figure it out as we go along, but some are more prepared than others – or at least using this time to maintain productivity, albeit in a new way. Because of that, we’d like to put out some helpful use cases and tips for how to use Geopointe right now, during COVID.
Here’s what some of those “more prepared” people are doing with Geopointe right now, and some ideas you can try for your own organization.
1. Use Geopointe to help plan and optimize your day
Some of our customers have found their departments repurposed or minimized, leaving fewer people available to make sales calls or follow up with prospects and customers. For those organizations that have endured these layoffs and downsizing as a result of the pandemic, manpower and bandwidth have become a common pain point. Geopointe helps with that.
Customers are using Geopointe’s map to help them plan out their days so they’re able to hit as many prospects and clients as possible, as efficiently as possible. Before starting their days, sales reps are using the mapping feature to visualize the accounts they must reach out to that day to help them prioritize and organize their calls.
Particularly for international organizations, but also for those with customers spread out across the country, time zones can be tricky. When sales reps are able to visualize the day’s accounts on a map, it’s easier to plan out which to call first (i.e. start with accounts located in Europe in the morning, end with those in Australia if you’re on the west coast) to reach more prospects during their work hours.
If you recognize there’s just no way you can get to all your sales calls in a day, use Geopointe to determine which to prioritize based on available information such as revenue, company size, and more. You can use features like thematic maps and heat maps that tell you a story about where the money is – which regions are more important to get to first?
2. Use Geopointe’s data visualization and inline editing capabilities to locate and update Salesforce records
Many of our customers are using this time, this “slow period,” to get their processes in order and set themselves up for success as soon as things reopen. Things like data management – cleaning your CRM, for example – have been made easier with a visualization tool like Geopointe.
With Geopointe, you can map your Salesforce data and get much more depth than you would from looking at a Salesforce report. Geopointe provides context; if you have thousands of records, throw them up on the map to make the data easier to analyze.
Many of us are visual learners, so it’s no surprise that our customers prefer to edit records directly from the map, rather than scrolling through endless Salesforce lists. This inline-editing capability is useful for editing individual records as you see errors while on the map. Rather than having to click away to find the record in its Salesforce list, then click into that record and edit it, you can simply click the field in Geopointe you want to update and edit it right there.
Customers who have data quality issues find Geopointe’s mass updating capability to be a huge time saver. Whether you need to fill in missing data or fix existing data errors, you’ll find the ability to perform these mass updates incredibly helpful.
3. Use Geopointe’s shape library to reconfigure territory assignments and identify opportunities
It’s one thing to comb through a Salesforce list or report with all the accounts assigned to each salesperson, but having a visual representation of the territories on a map makes it immediately clear who owns which accounts. There are two primary ways customers can visualize records to help paint a mental picture of hundreds of accounts by territory: clusters and heatmaps.
Clustering solutions allow you to see where accounts and contacts are concentrated, along with the number of records in those clusters. When you have thousands of records or data points, clustering is essential for simplifying your view of markers on the map.
Alternatively, our customers have found Geopointe’s heat mapping functionality to be invaluable. With heatmaps, you’re able to take data visualization and aggregation a step further, quickly narrowing down the focus to your most important customers.
Heatmaps and clustering helps you ensure accounts are evenly distributed across territories based on factors such as number of employees, revenue, or any other metric you have a field mapped to Geopointe for. From there, it’s easy to determine if territories need to be aligned or restructured, and adjust to set your team up for success in the future.
You can even use Geopointe to mine granular data sets and identify opportunities that become clear when a pattern in the data is uncovered – a pattern that would be much harder to recognize without this visualization of your Salesforce data.
Bonus: How one customer is using Geopointe in the exact same way, and still seeing major benefits
While adapting and changing your mindset is necessary in some instances, there are still some use cases for Geopointe that have stayed constant. One of our customers shared with us how they’ve been able to continue on with their process as-is despite other changes amid COVID.
Calendar-Based Scheduling is a feature that is just as helpful as ever for scheduling appointments and organizing your days. As a sales rep, you don’t have to be traveling to see the prospect in person to utilize the feature for scheduling your appointments. With the Calendar-Based Scheduling feature, one customer has continued to schedule all appointments the same way they did pre-COVID, finding it helpful for organizing and keeping everything you need in one place.
The Calendar-Based Scheduling feature has been a boon to both sales reps and sales managers because of the increased visibility it provides into users’ schedules. From the sales rep side, it’s easy to quickly pinpoint gaps in your schedule that can now be filled with more appointments.
Formerly, these gaps were usually spent travelling from one location to another, but now that they aren’t out on the road, reps are able to better utilize that time to either prepare for the upcoming meeting with extra research, or fill it with another call to increase the number of calls they’re able to complete in a day (thus increasing top-of-funnel volume).
Sales managers are able to employ the multi-user calendar in the same way they did before stay-at-home orders as well. As the manager of a team, you can easily keep track of your reps’ schedules without micromanaging and even add an important prospect call based on who has availability.
The fact that Geopointe is native to Salesforce is an added benefit, because when you use Calendar-Based Scheduling you’re staying within the Salesforce environment. This makes it easy to find everything you need in one place, especially with the ability to search for records right in the Geopointe map.
Reach Out
If any of these use cases piqued your interest or you’re looking for a way to adapt Geopointe for your own organization’s needs, we encourage you to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us today. If you take the time you have now to reach out to your Geopointe CSM, we’ll help you ensure you’re using the tool as effectively as possible. Whether you’re looking to adapt your processes to cope during the current situation, or hoping to use this down time to set yourself up for success as soon as businesses open back up again, we’re here to help.
Note: If you aren’t sure who your CSM is, simply contact us and we’ll direct you to the right person.
