What’s the secret to higher producing — and more productive — sales teams? Data.
With leads popping up by the moment, sales figures expanding and contracting across multiple territories, and quotas to be made, sales aren’t just one of the important aspects of your business; it’s also its most dynamic.
Data gives your sales team the proper direction it needs to predictably and consistently boost sales. And if you don’t use data? Your sales team is left rudderless and confused, making your territories vulnerable to your competition’s taking.
With stakes so high, your business must make the most informed, efficient, and high-yield decisions possible. High-quality, detailed data allows you to do so.
For example, data discovered this: territory design optimization is one of the simplest-to-implement, yet most effective, steps you can take to generate dramatically more revenue.
Harvard Business Review found that you can increase sales by up to 7% by optimizing your territory design, with, according to Alexander Group, a 10-20% increase in sales productivity.
In fact, research from Xactly found a 30% higher sales performance in companies that optimize their sales territory design.
The results are clear: to increase your revenue and outpace your competition, you must have detailed data and well-optimized territories: and the ability to plan winning sales strategies and execute them efficiently.
Enter sales territory mapping software.
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Top-performing organizations trust sales mapping software to make more informed and more profitable sales decisions. Sales mapping software integrates your company’s sales data with geolocation, transforming massive spreadsheets, unwieldy data sets, and complicated CRMs into easy-to-read territory data visualizations.
Your sales reps can spend more time doing the work that matters most to your business — sales — and less time worrying about the administrative details of sales territories and sales territory management. When your organization leverages effective sales territory mapping software, the job becomes easier and more streamlined.
While each software on the market provides the same core utility, the best sales mapping software helps your company grow by giving your sales reps access to performance-enhancing insights.
The best sales mapping software allows you to:
The benefits are bountiful. For example, sales managers receive the exact information they need to better run their territories, support their reps, and discover competitive advantages.
Sales reps get a repeatable system to generate leads, deepen their relationships, and increase their commissions.
When you manage sales territories more effectively, your organization gains a potent asset for increasing revenue, productivity, and profitability.
Not all sales territory mapping software is created equal.
Even though plenty of solutions offer to meet your basic needs — your sales data visualized on maps — many lack some or all of the features that mark the difference between a nice-to-have tool and a must-have asset. Must-have assets are what supercharge your sales team for maximum effectiveness.
The best sales mapping software understands its key purpose: to make it easy for you to generate as much revenue as possible, as easily as possible, in every single one of your territories. It’s more than just territory management. Rather, you need a tool that empowers your teams to work more efficiently while also maximizing sales productivity.
When deciding on your sales mapping software, look out for these features:
However, you also need the ability to draw custom boundaries based on your established territories and account for any on-the-fly pivots you need to make.
The best software mapping software also allows you to include Census-based demographic data, such as age, education, income, transportation, labor, gender, and more. This will help your sales team understand their customers better and improve your ad targeting’s efficacy.
Route planning tools will help your team save a lot of time by calculating the shortest possible routes, project travel time, and distance between locations, and create and save your sales routes. Together, these benefits help your team increase sales productivity. Look for a route optimization tool that will also allow you to easily change your route order, plot multiple routes to account for different scenarios, and plot an unlimited number of stops.
Exploring your options? These solutions are widely considered to be the best sales mapping software on the market today. Learn more about each solution, and whether they’re the right fit for your business, below.
Sales teams value Maptive for its rich feature set, including its built-in route optimization, ability to add and share customer insights and leads, and its robust filtration tool—particularly the “average sale” filter, which enables sales teams to target high-value leads.
Maptive allows you to create efficient sales routes, with unlimited stops, almost instantly. Simply and securely upload your location-based data on their 256-bit SSL-encrypted software and receive a fully customizable and easy-to-navigate map.
With a full feature set focused on intuitive route and territory design optimization, deep customization, and complete territory insights—including heat maps and demographics, Maptive is the best overall sales mapping software.
Interested in trying Maptive? Maptive offers a free, no-risk, 10-day trial—no credit card required, so you can start mapping now.
Badger Maps is one of the popular sales mapping software options, and for a good reason: their mobile-first approach. Designed for sales reps on the go, Badger Maps gives reps a full-featured app, including a live territory map with up-to-the-moment traffic updates, simplified admin tasks, and an automated check-in feature to keep managers in the know.
While Badger Maps does a very good job at route optimization, its features are unbalanced, with some users reporting that it’s overly complicated to adopt, and others left wanting more. While it’s great for sales reps in the field, it ignores several key features: including comprehensive data-driven sales insights, big-picture outlook, customization, and much more.
Spotio is a micromanager’s dream: it automatically tracks each sale’s reps’ stops (including date, time, and GPS coordinates), lets managers schedule their rep’s day with a built-in calendar, and updates maps when a rep closes a deal. If you want your sales managers to track their rep’s every move, then Spotio is the right solution for you.
However, this micro-view is also its biggest drawback. For one, its precise and persistent tracking favors sales managers with a turn-and-burn philosophy versus a team-first, growth, and retention approach. And users report Spotio’s difficulty in managing macro-level data, with maps becoming less detailed (and, therefore, less valuable) the more you pan out.
Looking for a no-frills sales mapping software? Mapline is a simple, basic entry point for organizations that want to try mapping software without any advanced features. And since it’s one-size-fits-all by design, you can use it for non-sales applications. Mapline is built to work with Microsoft Excel, so it’s an easy in-way for organizations using the Microsoft Office Suite.
If you want to extract key insights, however, you have to export the data yourself and ad hoc a solution of your own. Its design sacrifices functionality for adoption: making it easy for you to implement but difficult for you to get the basic results other sales mapping software provide.
eSpatial offers many of the exact things you want in your sales mapping software: deep customization, rich data sets (including Census demographic data), territory optimization, and Google Maps integration. In many ways, eSpatial is comparable in features to Maptive.
Where the two solutions differ is this: while Maptive integrates with virtually every spreadsheet and CRM Software, eSpatial only integrates with Salesforce. So, not only is it expensive on its own—$1,295 per year for a single user, and $2,995 for teams (with up to five users), even considering the required Salesforce-eSpatial stack comes with a hefty cost.
Google Maps is great. With its ease of use, free access, Street View, and robust API, Google Maps handily earns the award of “lowest-barrier-of-entry route planner.” No wonder sales mapping software solutions like Maptive and eSpatial build their services on Google Maps.
But keep this in mind: without the features included in a more comprehensive service, Google Maps is best for simple routes, bootstrapping companies, and teams that aren’t yet at the stage where customization will give them a competitive edge. For example, Google Maps only allows you to route ten stops (25 if you use a workaround) and doesn’t offer much in the way of route optimization on its own.
If you’ve tried Google Maps and found yourself wanting more, consider Maptive. Maptive offers all of the advanced options that Google Maps lacks but with a similarly user-friendly experience.
Like eSpatial, Geopointe is a designed-for-Salesforce application for sales data mapping. Available in Salesforce AppExchange, Geopointe location enables the Salesforce CRM, allowing you to analyze, manipulate, and visualize your customer accounts.
Already using Salesforce? Then Geopointe may work well for you as it’s less cost-prohibitive and more flexible than eSpatial. Prices start as low as $55 per user, and any features you want, outside of visualizing basic sales data, are available as add-on upsells. While Geopointe is not the right choice for most sales teams, it’s perfect for organizations that use Salesforce, are price-conscious, and prefer to pick their features as opposed to getting everything out of the box.
Like many of the options on this list, Maptitude allows your business to visualize geographic data in new ways. You can use Maptitude to discover geographic patterns that have been hiding inside your data, and you can also use Maptitude to organize this data in an easy-to-read and understandable way.
When you choose Maptitude for territory management, you’re able to see clearly where your customers are located, which sales territories are achieving the most success, any sales territory that is not maximizing its full potential, etc.
Among sales mapping software tools, AlignMix is one of the easiest to use. Its simple, attractive user interface makes onboarding and mastery a breeze, and it’s also easy to import and export information related to sales territory mapping across three hierarchical levels: normal sales territories, sales districts, and sales regions.
AlignMix does not offer the advanced and robust feature sets that you get with other territory mapping software options. But, if you’re just getting started and you want to make an impact for each individual sales rep, AlignMix is a quality entry-level option.
Xactly AlignStar is a sales territory mapping tool designed for sales operations and sales leadership. On the operations side, the product helps you optimize sales territory inefficiencies. It also helps you communicate changes to sales territories in a way that demonstrates fairness, accuracy, and how the sales territories best reinforce corporate objectives.
Sales leaders use Xactly AlignStar to gain needed visibility into the performance of their sales teams. When you use this sales mapping tool to align performance with targets, you’re better able to create future targets that are equal parts ambitious and attainable. The best sales leader integrates sales data into future projections, and that’s what Xactly AlignStar helps you do as a sales mapping solution.
You get a basic name but serious sales impact when you choose MapBusinessOnline as a territory management solution. This mapping software emphasizes affordability and ease of use. While it may not provide a deep feature set like some of the other sales mapping tools on this list, it can still be quite helpful with:
BatchGeo is a sales mapping tool that specializes in quickly converting spreadsheet data into geographic visualizations. It can be used for sales mapping and sales rep productivity, as well as for real estate work and retail store location analysis.
This is not free sales mapping software. But it is a product trusted by leading companies that rely on effective sales teams to drive year-over-year revenue increases.
For enterprises that have a lot of money to invest in territory mapping, Yellowfin is an attractive option. This platform helps you increase sales productivity through data storytelling and collaboration tools, data visualization, and automation that allow you to find relevant and insightful data quickly.
Yellowfin is more for sales-related data analytics and less for sales team management. But, for some companies, that might be exactly what they need to sell to new prospects and retain existing customers.
Use GeoMetrx for sales territory mapping and for a range of other activities, including access to shopper data and choosing ideal store locations. Territory mapping isn’t necessarily the primary purpose of GeoMetrx, but it is one of many things you can achieve using this tool.
Perhaps the best part of using GeoMetrx is how quickly you can create and iterate on a map design. Simply upload your data, and you can create attractive, easy-to-read territory maps in just minutes.
Use a series of inputs (including Google Sheets, Excel, CSV files, etc.) to turn static business data into territory maps for your sales reps via ZeeMaps. You can include an unlimited amount of markers per map, and you can provide three different levels of access control: admin, member, and viewer.
This is another sales territory tool that is perfect for organizations just starting out and operating with limited budgets. ZeeMaps is free, and you don’t even have to create an account to start building a territory map.
If you want your sales reps to thrive in the modern market, sales mapping software is a must-have. Integrating your customer data with detailed maps, these solutions give you the precise information you need to create sharply optimized territories, spot high-potential opportunities, and elevate your revenue generation far above your expectations—and competition.
Every business has unique needs, and some sales mapping software will pose a better fit for you than others. Regardless of your decision, rest assured that making the choice to implement sales mapping software will lead to better results.
Because it offers the full range of key features, as well as its ease of use, flexibility, and customization, Maptive is the best sales mapping software available.
Maptive gives your organization great tools to systematically increase your sales, including the ability to:
Sign up for a free trial of Maptive today and discover how our mapping software can help you boost your sales and empower your sales reps to work more efficiently, productively, and profitably.
Brad Crisp is the CEO at Maptive.com, based in Denver, CO and born in San Francisco, CA. He has extensive experience in Business Mapping, GIS, Data Visualization, Mapping Data Analytics and all forms of software development. His career includes Software Development and Venture Capital dating back to 1998 at businesses like Maptive, GlobalMojo (now Giving Assistant), KPG Ventures, Loopnet, NextCard, and Banking.