Sales is an art, not a science. Finding the best geographic location that makes sense, is profitable and a good fit for sales is no simple task.
It takes a sophisticated understanding of geo-political boundaries, competing businesses, traffic patterns, demographics and more. Who has expertise in all those areas? No one-that’s who.
But there’s something that can help. The digitization of business has ushered in many valuable sales tools, one being territory mapping software. According to some companies, you can use it to boost your sales. Here’s how.
Boundary Heat Map Software in Action. Image courtesy of Maptive
Consider the demographics
Every good business has profiled their ideal customer. Whether their target demographic is male or female, young or old, rich or poor, most businesses know who’s already buying from them and who’s most likely to become a customer in the future.
Territory mapping software enables you to upload demographic data, typically from Excel spreadsheets, to literally map the demographics of your customer base. With a mapping tool, you can easily see where your customers and prospects are.
Seeing the geography of your demographics will help you draw territory lines for your salespeople that are far more nuanced (and profitable) than simply using a highlighter to block out sections on a map. Besides these, you can sort the headquarters of prospective clients with the help of several other sales software and tools. Consider checking https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/sales-prospecting-tools/ to find six great tools for locating client headquarters during your sales arsenal.
Stay organized
Once you’ve defined your sales areas, it’s time to get your people out there. With intuitively designed territories, your expectations are clear and you can be sure your team will have minimal, if any duplication, saving you money and increasing the value of their time.
What’s more, most mapping software suites offer a way to track prospects once they convert to strong leads, helping your sales associates stay organized and keeping you in the loop on their progress.
Increase accountability
Once you send your salespeople off to conquer their new territories, you can use mapping software to see where they go, how long they stay, and how many of their sales calls convert to sales.
Although this may seem a bit intrusive, it increases your ROI, and it helps you keep your employees accountable. Every member of the team can see each other’s locations in real-time, motivating them to make as many quality calls as possible and garner more sales than their counterparts… and your competitors..Be fair
Let’s face it, people are fickle. If you aren’t careful to evenly distribute the territories, the result will be bad blood between employees and resentment toward you. Nobody wants that.
Keep morale and work ethic high by using territory mapping software to fairly define each sales area. This ensures everyone has the same amount of prospects and potential.
Map sales routes
Almost as challenging as creating territories is creating sales routes. You want your reps to take intuitive routes allowing them to make as many calls as possible while keeping the gas expenses to a minimum.
That’s no simple task, but mapping software is up for the challenge. Once a sales area is defined, the software can generate routes within territories to hit the hottest prospects, or even check in with existing customers.
Touch base
You might be asking why you should use territory mapping this way. Because maintaining a positive relationship with your current customers will lead to referrals. And referrals are gold.
Nearly three-quarters of executives prefer doing business with referred salespeople. Once they become customers, those referrals are 16 percent more valuable than existing, non-referred customers.
Having a hard time selling this one to your salespeople? Those who ask for and use referrals will earn four to five times more than their counterparts.
Need to rethink your territory mapping strategy? Engage mapping software today to ensure you create the best sales areas for your team and watch your business boom.