It is quite interesting to see how the CRM market and solutions have matured over the past 20 years. I’ve been around technology and helped businesses implement different solutions for the past 21 years. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many different clients around the world, mainly in Europe and the United States.
Technology may change and it definitely enhances what we do on a day to day basis, but the fundamentals of business do stay the same; with the objective to offer great services, products and wow factor to our customers, apart from making money and growing our business empires.
Technology moves on at a rapid rate and new solutions, new ways of working and achieving more with less continue to evolve and be developed. You only have to go back a couple of decades to when email was new, there was no social media and Satnav (if you were lucky and could afford it) was something you stuck to your windscreen as a separate device.
At this time, the CRM sector and available vendors offering solutions were limited. Software applications were going through a phase of bespoke build and as we headed into the late 90’s, early 2000’s, the phrase “build vs. buy” was coined. I remember working for one of the top 6 vendors and it was not until 2004 that SugarCRM entered the market.
Today there are hundreds of vendors offering CRM solutions, some more successfully than others and SugarCRM has a top spot for small and medium sized businesses and is a great solution. This was one of the reasons we selected it as part of our initial integration strategy with Mapsimise.
You may well think Mapsimise is a mapping platform but underlining this is data. Your data and Mapsimise enables you to get more from your data that is held in your SugarCRM.
We are also really pleased to be able to offer Mapsimise via the SugarExchange App Store and marketplace. You can find out more about that here.
So why would you want to map the data you hold in your SugarCRM on a map?
In the following examples I try and outline the benefits of this for your business…
Example 1 – Understanding more about your customers
Your current data is presented back to you in a list form and record types are separated into different list view which is great if you want to search for an individual customer record, but what all CRM system don’t do well is show relationships between customer locations and the location of related contacts. Using Mapsimise you can quickly and easily view all customer data by location, build territories and create routes for planned visits. You can map out appointments and see opportunity by area. Visual tools help you plan activities, gain location intelligence and deliver better services to customers by location.
Example 2 – Helping your sales teams to improve their organisation
We all know that sales team members always want to fill in data on a CRM system, but Mapsimise gives them a new incentive to access data in a more informative way, a way to schedule their appointments and to see related and non-related customer accounts in a single view. For those sales team members that are out on the road route planning and scheduling helps with reducing travel time and reducing stress of trying to be at the right place at the right time. Enhanced use of data can help your business grow and your sales increase. With Mapsimise your sales team can access data by location from Google Business Search and find additional prospects by type of business, by area. They can load data that might relate to customers from a CSV or Microsoft excel file to help build a true picture of a territory and get more done in less time with easy access from mobile or desktop device.
SugarCRM as a solution adds great value to your business activities for Sales, Marketing and Service departments, and by adding Mapsimise your team can enhance the data they use daily. The example above are just two ways the Mapsimise solution can help your teams do more, but there are many more including Marketing and Service along with tracking customer engagement.
How to get started with Mapsimise
If you are ready to get started, it's so easy! Start visualising your data on one or more maps by signing up to your own Mapsimise account and get started. Follow the steps below:
- Firstly, visit our website Mapsimise.com
- Click Get Started
- Select the package that suites your organisation
- Fill in the registration form
- Validate and log in to your Mapsimise account (by email)
- Add your billing information and select the connectors or upgrade from your Go Package
If you get stuck, you can sign into the Help Desk and raise a ticket with Mapsimise Support OR click here.
We look forward to working with you and helping you visualise your data, gaining location intelligence.
