Blog Archives - Page 17 of 24

5 Ways Sales Mapping Software Streamlines Your Sales Process

Written on May 3, 2017. Posted in Blog.

Since the development and launch of the first GIS back in 1960, modern GIS mapping software has changed and grown to the point where it is leveraged by companies to analyze and improve sales performance. As a sales expert, your top priority is increasing revenue. You have plenty of data and information about your sales territories and customer accounts. But there’s a problem: Sifting through all that data in your Excel spreadsheets is tedious, time consuming, and frustrating. There’s also a major chance that going through your data manually won’t give you accurate results, which can lead to costly sales decisions. Sales mapping software not only helps prevent inaccuracies, but streamlines your entire sales process when trying to make decisions about your sales territories and routes. Below are five ways you can leverage sales territory mapping to drive efficiencies in your sales process and improve overall revenue performance.

Focus on Specific Sales Areas with Clear Visualizations

You probably have spreadsheet after spreadsheet of information like customer addresses, store locations, and other account data. Viewing hundreds of Excel rows and columns isn’t an ideal way to identify trends and analyze your sales territories. With GIS mapping software, you can use features like territory overlays to filter the types of information you want to visualize. For example, you may want to view sales territories by zip code or county. This allows you to more quickly and easily examine your territory performance.

Identify Opportunities and Underperforming Areas

Trying to categorize which sales territories are performing well versus those that are not is difficult to do in an Excel spreadsheet, and can lead to unnecessary errors. When mapping your data, heat maps provide a color gradient to indicate higher-density areas. The brighter the color is on the map, the higher the density of your sales territory. Heat mapping lets you accurately determine what areas are the most successful, as well as which ones are underperforming and therefore require more resources.

Balance the Workload of Your Sales Reps

Do you know how the client or customer load is spread out across all your sales reps? What if you had a couple sales reps who were overworked and driving the most commission, while the rest lacked customers? With how much data and information is scattered throughout Excel spreadsheets, chances are you wouldn’t be able to catch those trends. When using sublayers, you can see the overall picture of where your clients are and how your sales reps are performing. If you are noticing that some sales reps have significantly more work than others, you can make decisions on how to balance the workload or figure out when the right time is to hire more to your team.

Strategically Optimize Routes

Time is money. And when your sales reps are in the field, the last thing you want them to do is travel routes that take longer and require more fuel. GIS mapping software helps you optimize your routes so you can reduce travel time for your sales reps and improve fuel efficiency. All this helps you increase the number of customers you reach, which improves your overall sales performance.

Greater Team Collaboration and Performance

Data spreadsheets don’t provide the insights and visibility you need to bring your sales team together to improve performance. And without visibility into your sales territories, you’ll miss opportunities and have a team of dissatisfied sales reps who won’t be able to see the growth and progress they’re making. When you map out your data, you can use features like pins and colors to call out leads and growth areas, so your sales reps have visibility into all the opportunities available, as well as what sales areas need improvement. Sales territory mapping and its capabilities can help streamline your sales processes by accurately showing territory performance, identifying which sales territories need more attention, and visualizing lead opportunities and showing the whole picture to unite your sales team. Learn how GIS mapping software can help you improve your sales performance.

Learn More About Sales Territory Mapping

New Roll Out: All About Mapping Performance and Sharing Enhancements

Written on April 5, 2017. Posted in Blog, Updates.

Improved Mapping Performance

There’s mapping and there’s Mapline mapping. The difference? Performance! We believe that with better mapping performance comes better results and faster analysis. So we are proud to announce that for the new roll out, our users will be able to have faster mapping experience. Try it out now and speed up your data analysis!

Sharing Enhancements

Another equally important roll out is the enhancement in map sharing option. First, users to whom the maps that are shared with edit permissions can no longer delete a map. Instead, the owner of the map or the administrator can just un-share the map with them. When a user is trying to delete a map, a message prompt will appear:

sharing option 8

Second, when sharing a map with a user’s dataset, a message prompt will appear asking the owner of the map if the datasets should be shared as well:

sharing option 7

Third, a shared map can only be duplicated when it is shared to someone with edit permission.

Be Mapline Ready!

In the 2nd quarter of 2017, with Mapline giving you the best mapping experience and the best value for money, don’t be just mapping ready. Be Mapline ready!

How Mapline’s Web-Based Mapping Tool Gets Your Whole Team Involved

Written on February 21, 2017. Posted in Blog, Why Mapline.

Have you ever lost an important file in a sea of email chains between your colleagues? Email is a great way to communicate with your team, but it’s very easy to miss the latest version of an attached spreadsheet that has the most up to date data and information. At Mapline, we’ve worked to eliminate the need for confusing, back-and-forth email chains with our web-based mapping tool. How, do you ask? We’ll tell you! Start by pasting your spreadsheet data into Mapline to visualize the information. Once the map is created, you can then enter the email addresses of each individual you’d like to share the map with. Your team members and colleagues will be able to view the map and check out any updates or changes whenever they need to. Much easier than emailing out three, four, even five versions of the same spreadsheet, right? Here’s some real case scenarios where this comes in handy:

Identify New Retail Site Locations

Your retail business is growing quickly and you’re ready to expand to a new location. Now it’s up to you to decide what location will give your business the most bang for its buck. With Mapline, you can map out where your competitors are located and what geographic locations your specific business would flourish in based on your consumer data. You and your team can then work together off the web-based map to determine the best expansion location.

Determine Distributor Routes

When dealing with large quantities of data, it’s extremely beneficial to be able to view that information in an easily digestible format. And when communicating with manufacturers and distributors across the supply chain, it’s even better when that information can be shared and updated effortlessly. After uploading your list of distribution centers and drivers to Mapline to create, you can determine the most optimal distribution routes and share the map with your peers across the supply chain.

Customize Real Estate Maps

Mapline is great for mapping out available homes and real estate. Once you have real estate data like square footage and listing price ready to go, create a map for agents and clients who would be interested in the properties. You can also customize your real estate mapping with photos or color-coded pins, or create a personalized map for a client with their top home choices. Learn more about our web-based mapping tool’s sharing feature that lets you share maps in real time with your colleagues and clients.

Mapline vs Badger Mapping: The Difference in Mapping Software Features

Written on February 21, 2017. Posted in Blog, Why Mapline.

Not every mapping software is made equal. In fact, the right software for you all depends on your goals and the end-result you’re looking for. For example, if you need a solution with mapping software features focused on helping your sales team track new leads and close more deals, Badger Mapping offers those capabilities. But what if you want something that not only helps your sales team, but also tracks overall business performance and growth opportunities? This is where Mapline comes in! Here we take a deeper dive into Badger Mapping and Mapline to learn more about these solutions’ mapping software features.

Sales Support

Badger Mapping: This is Badger Mapping’s bread and butter, really. Their application allows you to visualize, colorize, and filter your customers on a map to look for the best opportunities. The search function also lets you search for new lead opportunities in your sales territories. To help make the sales process more efficient, Badger Mapping offers features like route optimization, CRM integration, and a built-in mileage counter to help track gas and miles while in the field.

Mapline: Mapline provides similar sales support and then some. You can create clearly defined sales territories that allow you and your team to identify trends and analyze geographic performance quickly and easily. You can do this in two ways:

If you don’t have too many territories to analyze, you can use Mapline’s drawing tab to draw out the territories yourself on the map.

But if you’re dealing with more complicated territories that include groupings of zip code, county, or state boundaries, you can leverage our territory overlays

Business Growth Opportunities

Badger Mapping: As a field sales tool, Badger Mapping’s lead generation feature locates new leads and helps you more efficiently schedule meetings with customers and prospects.

Mapline: Mapline gives you the full, 360 view when you’re looking for the right place to grow your business. You simply paste your spreadsheet of competitor data into Mapline and voila! You have a clear map view of where your competitors are located, and you can identify potential locations far enough away from your competitors with the best opportunity for success.

Business Operations

Mapline’s capabilities extend even further to easily assist you in improving your operations and marketing initiatives:

If you need to find backup supply options to streamline your operations, just paste in your locations and suppliers and run a distance calculation within the map. The result is a downloadable distance grid spreadsheet that tells you what your closest supply options are.

To visualize company performance, leverage our territory heat map to visualize the business performance of your customers or locations within your sales territories.

Customer segmentation gives you greater insight into your customers to enhance your marketing efforts. Just map your Excel data and use our Sublayer tool to visualize your information for greater insights into your customer behaviors and needs.

While Badger Mapping helps sales map out leads to close more deals, Mapline provides sales support and makes it extremely easy to track performance and efficiently drive greater strategic business decisions with Learn more about our mapping software features.

New Updates

Written on February 8, 2017. Posted in Blog, Updates.

What a great way to start the year! As we stay true to our commitment to make mapping simple, we’ve rolled out another set of updates to make your mapping experience simpler while making it more fun! You asked and we listened. Now, it’s time for you to sit back and watch how these new updates can help you with your mapping:

Dot Density

This new addition reveals where locations are clustered. Many users have been asking for this feature because this is especially useful when mapping locations or phenomena that change dramatically over an area. 7-11 Dot Density

Ability to Save Column Widths on Spreadsheet Page

You can now slide the ruler of the columns in any way you want and it will be saved. When maps are shared, those whom the maps have been shared with will also see the saved column widths of the spreadsheet. save column width

Ability to Delete Selected Rows from a Dataset

We’ve made it easier to delete locations from your datasets. Now you don’t need to click the locations one by one to delete them. Just click the rows that you want to delete, click the “Selected rows” on the drop down arrow of “Delete” button and bam! Your locations will be deleted all at once. delete selected rows

Added Support for Degree Formatted Coordinates

Mapline can now support decimal and degree coordinates.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

There are a few bugs that we captured and fixed. We thank you all for your feedback and queries. If not for them, we would not be able to make these updates successful. Let us know if you have more suggestions. We are open to feedback. What else would you like to be simpler to accomplish while mapping with us?

V5 Update Summary

Written on December 18, 2016. Posted in Blog, Updates.

If we were to sum up the year 2016 in one word, it would be “change.” Yes, a lot of changes happened this year, changes that best suit you, our dear Mapline users. We are committed to continuously add more features to the application that will help our users find fast results in mapping. So what have we been up to for the past few months?

Mapline’s V5 Update Takes Simple to a New Level

What better way to improve than to remain true to our name – Mapline. Hence, we find that simplicity is essential in creating a powerful data analysis tool. The simpler it is to use, the better the results of your decisions. With simplified navigation, we can make mapping and analysis become entrenched within your organizations. Here are some of the changes in our V5 update that add up to the new “look” of Mapline:

What’s New Link – In just one click, you can see the features/changes that were recently added. This is a great addition since you will be informed of the changes before you actually start mapping.

Menu in the Logo – As you click the Mapline logo, you will see the Datasets and Maps options – so you can quickly jump right into mapping!

Profile options in top right menu – Need to change something on your profile? Just click your name at the upper right corner and click “Profile.”

Home and Account pages are mobile-friendly – With more and more users reviewing their accounts using their hand-held devices, we’ve optimized more of our site for mobile-friendly viewing and navigation.
Plan limits and geocoding limits display on bottom left – Here’s a summary of your plan limits so you would know what has been consumed and what are the remaining limits – strategically located to keep you informed.

Messages appear when logging in – >After logging in, a message will appear at the bottom of the page – be it a reminder, a tip or a suggestion.
Simplified navigation menu – Need I say more?

Your Data Stays in its Original Format – Previously, the order of your columns and your column headers could be changed when they were uploaded. Now, your data will be preserved exactly as you uploaded it both in the spreadsheet view and in the bubble on the maps.

Territory Reports to our Coverage Overlay Feature – Now instead of having to draw custom circles around each pin to get a territory report, you can use the coverage overlay to do it for you. Then you can click on whichever location you want to get a report for, and Mapline will show you all data within that coverage area.

Take Features from Good to Great

We’ve seen a shift this year as we continue to develop features and make changes so that you can create actionable insights from your data while making your mapping more useful. So be on the lookout for more updates to our current features in 2017.

What to Expect in 2017

As 2016 comes to a close and 2017 gets under way, you can expect more changes for the better. As a trusted name in mapping, Mapline will continue to uphold on the high value of giving you the simplest and best mapping experience in the coming year and beyond.

Give us a call. We'd love to talk!