Overcoming The Most Common Field Sales Challenges by Integrating Maps within Dynamics 365 CRM

“I would like to dedicate this hard-earned award to my family, my colleagues, my considerate clients, and the amazing features of Maplytics! Yes, winning the award for the Best Salesperson of the Year would not have been possible if Maplytics would not have made my on-field life easier by providing easy solutions to my everyday sales troubles. I’m not that pro at using technology, however, the super easy-to-use interface of Maplytics, the flagship product of Inogic, made my usage process comfortable”, said Jenny on winning the prestigious award at the Annual Awards night of her organization.

Let us understand Maplytics – You preferred Maps integration app for Dynamics 365 CRM / Dataverse which Jenny seems to be so fond of. The importance of locational intelligence for collected data has increased to 85-95% for various industries. To make this importance worthwhile for any business, effective packages are essential for integrating data, geospatial points, and maps. Maplytics is one such geo-analytical, all-inclusive mapping solution whose prime features make data visualization over Maps, aligning of sales territories, plotting of optimized routes, real-time tracking of field reps, etc. easy and comfortable.

A 5-star rated Preferred App on Microsoft AppSource, it is devised to help almost every Team of any organization, from the C-Suite to the field reps. Here are a few of the most common hurdles faced by the Field Sales Reps like Jenny almost every day which Maplytics helps in resolving in its unique way.

Case 1: Defining sales Territories

While targeting leads to fetch new clients, the sales reps often enter into each other’s areas of work. This introduces an unhealthy competition among the reps and affects the Teams equation. Maplytics presents the feature of Territory Management that allows sales territories to be defined, aligned, and re-aligned virtually over map. These can be assigned to specific reps in-charge ascertaining their responsibility. The productivity and progress of these territories also need to be looked after.

This distribution confirms only the assigned rep is answerable for a particular territory while ensuring proper workload distribution. If required, the territories can be re-aligned and re-assigned further.

Case 2: Appointment with the Clients

Visiting clients for meetings or other services is the most important task for the sales reps and the service reps. In case of the unavailability of the clients at the nth hour, meetings have to be cancelled. In this process, the reps end up wasting time. As a solution for such situations, Maplytics calls for Automated Appointment Planning. Using this feature, the Managers of the reps organize a meeting calendar for the reps well in advance to be followed up for a day, or for a few weeks. The appointments are booked throughout the day for varying durations as per the rep’s skills, topics of discussion, and the availability of the clients. The rep can view this schedule on his mobile phone while being on the go. In case of cancelations, ad-hoc meetings can be booked by the rep while traveling using their mobile phones or tablets, and the appointment schedule gets adjusted. The records for the meetings scheduled, attended, cancelled, and re-scheduled are maintained for future use. Reps can check-in and out of these planned meetings through cell phone apps while being at the actual meeting locations.

With this feature, the rep enters an appointment well updated, the meetings are conducted within the stipulated time, different clients can be accommodated in case of cancelations and the reps can maintain a professional relationship with the clients while enjoying a work-life balance.

Case 3: Routes to the Clients

Reaching the meeting spot of a planned meeting is very essential. A delayed entry leaves a lasting negative impression on the client extending the meeting beyond the scheduled time limit or truncating it due to the unavailability of members beyond prescribed hours. The delay is majorly caused due to traffic, improper road directions, or other such impromptu travel hiccups. Route Optimization of Maplytics helps curb these issues. When the client records to be visited for the day are plotted over the map, the feature helps plan an optimized route to be followed by the rep to travel to these clients. The route avoids traffic, tolls, roads under repairs or construction, bridges, etc., and is the fastest route. Turn-by-turn navigation instructions too are provided along with the route. These could be viewed on the Google Maps or Waze App even. The routes and the directions get re-aligned when the client to visit gets changed or added along the way.

The benefit of this practice is that the reps find the meeting place easily, are punctual, don’t get lost in travel, and save a lot of time, energy, and fuel. This also leaves a lasting impression on the clients and strengthens relationships.

Case 4: Searching places along the way

When the reps are on a travel spree, they often need help in terms of good restaurants to eat at, gas stations for their vehicles, directions to the nearest ATMs, airports, railway stations, supermarkets, etc. Often consulting the passers-by or following the worn-out, old road signs is not convenient. With the Point Of Interest Location and Along the Route function, the crux is somewhat resolved. Having marked his POI Location, the rep can search for the places of interest around him. Thus, having checked out the nearest place, he can plot directions to that place and follow the accurate directions provided. Similarly, while following an optimized route, if a rep gets informed about a change of plan by the client, he can quickly find another client to visit along his existing travel route and re-direct his travel there, thus, avoiding any waste of time.

With this feature options for safe places of interest can be plotted and visited as per choice saving time and fuel. New meetings can be scheduled to compensate the cancelled, postponed ones along the same travel route by the traveling reps themselves using their tablets or mobiles.

Case 5: Creating personalization for Clients

A Client feels important when he feels he’s unique. Thus, providing personalization and presenting them to the clients during meeting is essential. Maplytics allows entities to be categorized and narrowed down.  This helps the reps to provide the clients a clear view of the data they want to focus on while working on CRM data. They can be shown how pushpins could be customized. The shape, size, colour, and image of the pushpins can be changed as desired while presenting statistical data graphically over maps. The customized graphics make presentations simpler.

The PCF component within Maplytics can also be introduced to visualize data from multiple search criteria on the map within CRM. This would help in enhancing user experience while working with entity views and individual records. With the option of being able to add Templates to Dashboards, Maplytics saves crucial browsing time.

Apart from these, the other features of Maplytics also help Managers by integrating the census data with maps for easy strategizing, providing graphical display to the clients using heat map and detail map for quick understanding, accommodating global clients with the multi-language option, etc. Maplytics is like a library of books belonging to different genres. We saw some of the best-selling ones above. To read the rest in-depth, do visit the website and have a look at the Blogs, Video Library, and Success Stories.

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