Sales teams should always be on the lookout for ways to improve their process and, as a result, improve their sales. If you’ve ever tried to navigate the Salesforce AppExchange, you are likely very aware of the many tools available to help sales teams.
When it comes to improving sales, the space you should turn to for solutions is the “geolocation” category. Not only do geolocation tools provide invaluable support to sales teams, but they also bleed into teams across your entire organization.
As you begin your search for the right geolocation application, there are a few key functionalities to zero in on to help you plan, act, and analyze your sales process.
Plan: Identify the Best Regions to Target
Finding the right area or region to target is a key component to your team’s success in sales — whether it’s the region most populated with your target demographic or it’s the region with the highest amount of potential annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Geolocation data solutions can help simplify this process.
Having access to visualization tools will provide you the in-depth ability to complete geographic searches and analyze your existing CRM data. Rather than pulling multiple reports and spreadsheets, you can use something like a heatmap feature to identify hotspots for the specific factor you are targeting.
Act: Streamline Business Trips with Optimized Routes
Field sales team road warriors know the value of planning out your trips and routes. Heading out on the road without an optimized route can result in unnecessary backtracking and/or missed opportunities with customers or a prospect.
Having the ability to plan, build and execute your travel plans from mappable existing data can be just the solution you need to boost your business.
Geolocation tools with routing features are ideal for scheduling your routes days, weeks or months in advance. Additionally, using a tool that integrates with your CRM will eliminate the tedious task of going back and forth between applications to type in the information needed to create a route in a separate mapping tool.
Another feature to keep in mind is mobile readiness. You need to ensure your driving directions are handy once it’s time to hit the road and, ideally, your data and route will be housed in one application. This will, again, eliminate the need to switch back and forth between applications to get the information you need.
Optimize Customer Service and Account Management
As we all know, your ability to succeed in sales is dependent upon your ability to provide a quality customer service experience. Therefore, any chance to improve your process here is a chance to improve your sales potential.
Being able to work quickly and efficiently is one way to improve your team’s customer service skills. With the right geolocation tool, you should be able to complete a search of your Salesforce records and make a mass update with a simple click of a button.
This will not only reduce the amount of time spent on one customer, but it will also cut down on the time a customer has to wait for you — who doesn’t love getting a little time back in their day?
Geolocation solutions make your data visible and actionable from a map, which provides endless opportunities to streamline the process for customer-facing teams. Let’s say you have an entire territory that is going to be managed by a new sales rep. Rather than having to go into each contact record to make an update, geolocation tools make it as easy as clicking a button.
Analyze: Paint the Big Picture
You planned which regions contain the highest potential, you eliminated drive time by optimizing your routes, your customer service is the best it has ever been…but did you see improvements anywhere?
You could run a report in your CRM to see if numbers changed anywhere. You could run another report to see updated record counts. You could run yet another report to see how many opportunities you and your team closed this quarter. You could sort all of these reports to find out how the regions you were targeting actually performed.
Or, instead, you could see the big picture using thematic maps.
With a few clicks you can take pertinent data sets, visualize them and make them easily accessible for strategic planning. By rolling up metrics such as record count, dollar amount or won opportunities using defined geographic boundaries (like those targeted regions you already identified), you can easily see where there were changes and drill down from there to see the specific areas that changed.
Adding a geolocation application to your toolset can greatly improve your sales process. Research happens to be the key when looking to bring on a new solution for your team. Be sure to choose the one that provides the most benefit for your sales team.
A good place to start is to speak with our team to see how Geopointe can work for you.
