Well, it is what we do, but why, well there are probably a stack of really good reasons operationally and organisationally why you need to understand your productivity by location, but in this article, I’m looking at customer data and how you can manage your customers and understand where they are.
Location intelligence does give you some great insight when you connect data together, but let’s take it back, right back to the basics, and look at how you manage your data right now.
Yes, research shows that only about 10% of businesses use or have an effective CRM that helps them record data. Now there are 100’s of different CRM applications and the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SugarCRM are some of the market leaders, and you as a business owner or team member maybe using one of these.
Let us know in the comments below what you use 👇on a daily basis.
But this does leave a big question unanswered, what are the other 90% of you using, I can probably make a wild guess and say things like Microsoft Excel or Google sheets. As you may know I’ve worked in the tech industry for about 23 years now, and worked with many different businesses, and one of the biggest that was running everything on excel had a forecast revenue of 64 million per year.
But their systems were complex, but they worked, but excel sheets are not very secure, and can be duplicated in your organisation, so a database is always far better.
Ok, just a quick plug for the pending V4 of Mapsimise as we are introducing forms and data table editing which means you can create an effective customer database and see everything by location, ok promo over.
But that does not yet answer the question of why and how you benefit from seeing data by location, which I will cover in a bit, but lets first think about the value of your business data.
Did you know that your data is, and can become a very valuable asset to your business if it is well organised and easy to understand?
More and more businesses are seeing acquisition prices increase based on well organised, well structure data and systems, but that is still not the main reason for location intelligence.
As you will know already there are several key areas in your business, if you are smaller in size you might feel like it is all one function, but in common terms it breaks down into
· Sales,
· Marketing,
· Service,
· Financials
and
· Operations
Yes, you might have others defined, but these are the core activities of most businesses.
The question is how is Location Intelligence going to help in these different areas of activity?
Let’s look at Sales👇
Well, there are two main types of sales either digital which has become very popular through the pandemic or in person sales, which although popular is seeing a decline in both B2B and B2C. The best definitions I heard recently was your sales activity is either Analogue or Digital.
But understanding where your customers are, how they relate to each other and the location can significantly help when organising events, or onsite appointments, minimal drive time and seeing relationships with the location and where your customers are can also lead to better marketing.
Marketing by location 👇
So, I know what you are thinking, I hear you, you might be saying, how does that work, but let me explain as marketing by location can be reactive and also very efficient. Instead of that blanket eShot of “Buy My Thing” that gets sent to 20k or more email addresses, stop and think for a moment, use what is happening in a location to your advantage. If you have customers in a area that is hit by flooding or storms or a heat wave, send an engaging email to see if your customers are ok. If there is a big sporting event happening, look at taking you top customers that are near the location.
I say all this as recently we did this for a customer as a test, and even I, a hard nosed email sender was surprised that the engagement rate went up from a read rate of 2% to nearly 16%, as the email spoke to the person about what was happening in their location. But planning sales and marketing by location is fine, but service and operational logistics also benefit from Location Intelligence.
Service, Support and Operations by location.
Data obviously spans your whole organisation and geospatial tools like Mapsimise are ideal for any organisation that has data, that is pretty much a given. So how does it help in service and operations, well planning and using less time and resource can help your teams get more done in a day, understanding your customer drops, and appointments is a given, but could just mean you achieve better planning and get more done in less time.
But being able to share data from your services and support teams with your sales in a single view also has value, shall we say stopping those “really embarrassing” calls from Sales who try and sell new services when there are open cases with your customer.
You may want to understand where the predominant number of calls come from especially if you provide wired services like telecom or broad band, this way you can trend activity of call and appointments overtime, even heat map active areas.
So, this is Why 👇
This is why understanding your data by location, knowing where and what your customers are doing and trending through analysis helps you make better and faster decisions, and we do all this to help you do more.
Feel free to check out https://Mapsimise.com, and grab a free account
See our overview below, its all about your data, your customer and what you do
What we do 👇
business data, geospatial, location, customer relationship management, understanding your data, data analytics, customer location, see my customers by location, filter data by location, make a data map, route planning for customers, see data layers on a map, build marketing lists from a map, CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365,Salesforce,Sugar CRM, Location Intelligence, Map, maps, mapping, mapsimise, data, heat map, cluster, clustering, visual, business systems
