Effectively communicating sales goals can be tough, especially when a business has lost focus on their sales targets, is disorganized, or distracted. Mapping is a valuable resource used to share goals, set expectations, and stay organized. These geographical representations of a company’s sales territories are easy to build, affordable, and can drive a business forward towards success.

The reasons modern businesses have moved from manual sales maps to web-based versions include route optimization and identification of growth opportunities. Sales mapping has the potential to make a huge difference in sales team operations.

What is Sales Mapping?

Sales mapping is the creation of custom maps of sales territories, business expansions, and business workflows. Web-based mapping technology is often used by businesses to organize business data in a geographical format. Mapping your sales process will allow you to easily uncover potential inefficiencies in your sales performance, as well as gain valuable insight into strategies that improve your business. Success is often measured by the performance of a business’s sales department; with a tool such as mapping software, sales teams better manage their territories and customers, achieving a higher level of performance.

Using a sales territory map, sales representatives can easily define territory ownership on a map. Sales teams can also use the information gathered on these maps to analyze sales performance, discover new opportunities, and calculate routes. By dividing sales territories and managing them with interactive maps, businesses create growth. Properly aligned sales territories result in higher employee morale and increased productivity among sales reps. It is important to understand how to use mapping to its full advantage and properly delegate work, creating a balance of responsibilities.

How Sales Mapping Helps Manage Territories

Sales mapping is an excellent way for businesses to manage their sales territories and track the location of their leads, current customers, and former customers. A target audience can be segmented and analyzed with heat maps to determine which areas are thriving and which may not be reaching their full potential. There are many ways that businesses can use mapping, such as the use of plotting pins based on customer zip codes or by drawing shapes around specific territories.

Mapping software makes tracking and analysis easy. When dealing with large amounts of data, it can often be tough to see patterns or trends; organizing this data on a map makes the patterns more noticeable. Data can be separated based on a variety of criteria, such as the product or service purchased, the amount purchased, the frequency of purchases, and similar criteria. A map is easily created by importing the data from a simple spreadsheet to the mapping software; this map can be analyzed, shared, and modified as needed.

Optimize Travel Routes

Sales mapping creates optimized routes, allowing you to visit all of your locations in a defined order maximizing the time of your sales reps. Use mapping to first break up your data based on locations, then segment the data into smaller groups based on other criteria particular to your business. The map allows you to easily create ‘smart’ routes for each employee to optimize their route and travel time.

Identify Potential Areas for Growth

Businesses can also use mapping to identify new growth opportunities by performing a competitive analysis to locate areas that may be underserved by other companies in your field. Inputting market and customer data visualizes on the map, which areas are most likely to lead to the highest profits.

Talk to the Sales Mapping Experts

Web-based mapping has become a popular way for modern sales teams to increase performance and empower their representatives. Mapping software is also cost-effective, offering a wide range of features designed to make route optimization, sales management, and market analysis fast and simple. For more information on using sales mapping or to acquire sales mapping software, contact the sales mapping experts at Mapping Resources.