It’s been a full day of prospecting. You’ve spent the entire day in your car. You get home and realize that there were two clients in that area you could have stopped in to speak to – Doh! If only there was a way to see your territory on a map with all your prospects and clients so that you could better coordinate your visits. But wait…there is…help is here with Salesforce training.
You may not do any formal route mapping at all. You go where the calls are. Or you may try to route your day – painstakingly input each prospect location into Google maps or worse, plot them by hand on a map. You may even have a map of all your customer accounts – even if it’s a few months old. This system works great when there are no changes and no last-minute meetings…right. Real estate sales reps, we’re talking to you. Software sales reps, you too. How about pharmaceutical sales – you too. If you pound the pavement, carry a bag, or travel to visit prospect, we’re talking to you.
Well guess what, your fancy Saleforce.com system and a little Salesforce training can help. How? With some very basic Salesforce training we will show you how to get a mapping application in Salesforce.com that automatically maps all your prospects and accounts. You would have real-time access, whenever you need it to the map. You can filter by prospect, filter by accounts, or view both. Whether your territory is local, national or international, there’s a mapping app for that.
Applying Salesforce Training for More Prospecting…and More Selling
Whether your route is planned, or you get a surprise call, you can quickly call up the account on your map and map directions from your current location to your destination – from your phone, tablet or PC.
It’s also handy if you have inside sales or appointment setters who are also planning some of your contacts for the day or week. They can also access your calendar and map, to help coordinate appointments that are nearby on the same day, and if the prospect can’t be scheduled on the same day as those around them, inside sales or the appointment setter can make sure that you have enough time between appointments to actually get to where you need to go. No more appointments space 30 minutes from each other on the calendar, that are 1.5 hours from each other when driving. Yes, this deserves a big smile. Imagine the time you will save that you can now use for more prospecting or closing more business. You could be more productive.
Even for the newest reps, who are not all that familiar with time management, this app can help them figure out territory management quickly and easily.
Visually Manage Your Territory with Salesforce Training
There’s yet another advantage to this app – you can visually manage your territory. You can quickly see if there are areas where you have no active prospects or clients, and areas that are saturated. It helps you maintain more even coverage across your entire territory. From a Sales Manager’s perspective, it helps you see where your reps are spending their time, and where they might need to spend more time.
In Salesforce training, you can learn how to develop custom views as well – see all your major accounts, see all your account under 50 employees, see all your accounts that were marked opportunity lost – for follow up campaigns. You can customize your views to really make the most of prospecting new business, maintaining current business or warming up lost business.
These custom views take on even more power for as a Sales Manager to help you mentor your sales force. Imagine being able to view leads with a score of a certain level or higher – you can map out your low hanging fruit by rep, by region, or by country. You can visually check your 30-60-90 funnel and see where the opportunities lay for travel reasons. You can manage your own schedule to make an informed decision on when you want to ride along with your reps and which accounts you want to visit. Does your sales force have account managers and are you using service cloud? Imagine if each Account Manager could map all major accounts with outstanding service issues. Marketing – see which accounts bought product X, and not product Y for cross-sell campaigns. Use your imagination. This gets powerful real fast.
Now that you’re all excited (hopefully!), here are a few apps to check out that do the job. Review the features and read the reviews. Let us know which one might work best, and we can easily include it as a Salesforce training module. Some are free, some are paid, make your own decision – but doesn’t it seem like the investment will be worth it?
Google Maps for Salesforce.com
Salesforce International Mapping using Google Maps
Geopointe: Google Maps & MapQuest for Salesforce
G2 Maps, Geographic Mapping Analytics
Or for a full list of apps, check out the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
SalesForce Training is North America’s premier sales training company, focusing on both salesforce.com training, support, and implementation. SalesForce Training’s mission is to help firms operating in a Salesforce.com environment get more out of their CRM, sales processes, sales management and sales teams.
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