Analysis: GIS Apps and General Mapping Apps

ESRI - 

• Overview: ArcGIS is a comprehensive suite of mapping and location intelligence tools and capabilities that help businesses in healthcare, banking, manufacturing and other industries manage field operations, data collection, visualization, workflow configuration and more. Field workers can perform inspections, track assets and capture asset data, such as photos, videos, audio recordings, notes or markups. 

ArcGIS's business analyst application lets managers generate location-specific insights to optimize market planning, site selection and customer segmentation operations. The strategic, tactical, operational and informational dashboards allow supervisors to gain visibility into KPIs, data trends and project status. Also, you can use the crowdsource reporter tool to submit issues, observations, reviews and comments on specific plans and proposals anonymously.

ArcGIS can be deployed on local machines (ArcGIS Pro), on your remote or on-premises servers (ArcGIS Enterprise), or as SaaS hosted by Esri (ArcGIS Online). Along with software, Esri provides a comprehensive collection of data and content to geo-enrich your own data. ArcGIS also provides rich software development tools for you to configure and create your own mapping and location intelligence products.

• Reference Customers: They don’t have case studies listed, but our guess is that basically every government in the world is a customer along with a lot of other organizations. Governments probably don’t like to talk about what they do with their software. But note that they have 6,000 employees, so they have a lot of customers. 

• Potential Issues: ESRI is the largest GIS software company (depending on how you want to count Google Maps on the consumer side). They solve lots of cartographic problems, but purpose built sales apps are not a focus area for them. You likely need a specialist to use this software. That being said, this is probably the most powerful geographic or cartographic analysis software made today. If you are reading this analysis that is focused on Mapping Sales Apps, this is probably not what you are looking for, however, if you read this analysis and say, “None of these things are what I need, I have this specific mapping problem that no commercial software company seems to solve,” Then potentially you would need to build a custom piece of software with the ESRI platform.

• Demo: here. Full youtube channel here.

• Published price: not published

Scribble Maps -

• Overview: Scribble Maps enables you to build custom maps and identify insights across real estate, engineering, research, business, exploration, construction, and manufacturing. Discover and get insights into neighborhoods, understand relationships and locations of infrastructure like airports and trains, get insights into business metrics to uncover opportunities, track diseases and health trends, do academic research, and create maps and boundaries. You can import your data, draw shapes, analyze your data to make better decisions, and share your maps with anyone. There is some overlap here with the GeoAnalytics tools, the difference is that here you can build your own maps.   

Scribble is a very powerful tool for a very reasonable price, so this should be on your list of products to try out if you need a General Mapping App.

• Reference Customers: Google, Microsoft, FedEx, CBRE, NHS. No case studies published

• Potential Issues: This is a small company so the functionality will not be as rich as something like ESRI. But the good news is that you can expect it to be a lot easier to use. It is well reviewed, so if you need to make a beautiful custom map of your sales data to make better decisions, this is a product to try out. 

• Demo: Here. Here is full YouTube. 

• Published price: here

MapPoint -

• Overview: This general mapping software was discontinued in 2014, but because it was an easy mapping tool, many sales organizations used to use it, and many still do. If you still use it, you should probably try some of the modern software available to you today that has been purpose built to solve different sales mapping problems. 

• Reference Customers: N/A

• Potential Issues: N/A 

• Demo: N/A

• Published price: N/A 

Streets and Trips -

• Overview: Also known as Microsoft AutoRoute (outside of the US). Just like MapPoint, this general mapping software was discontinued in 2014, but because it was an easy mapping tool, many sales organizations used to use it, and many still do. If you still use it, you should probably try some of the modern software available to you today that has been purpose built to solve different sales mapping problems. 

• Reference Customers: N/A

• Potential Issues: N/A 

• Demo: N/A

• Published price: N/A

BatchGeo -

• Overview: BatchGeo is a quick way to put geographic data on a map. Just seeing your data on a map can make it come alive and you can get insights from it. BatchGeo is the easiest way to get your list of addresses on a map. Most geographic data is stored in a spreadsheet, but with BatchGeo, you can turn that spreadsheet into a map to visualize and do some basic analysis of your data. Data can be color coded by groups or ranges, or even heat mapped.

BatchGeo also makes it easy to share your map. BatchGeo can also make maps that can be used for a store locator for your website.

• Reference Customers: Amazon, Apple, Bose, Cisco, CocaCola, FourSeasons, MSNBC, Nordstrom, Porsche. No Case Studies published.

• Potential Issues: This product is generally well reviewed. People have complained in reviews that this is a fairly basic tool that doesn’t let them do the specific needs that they have. In general in our opinion most people complaining could find the purpose built thing that they are trying to do somewhere else in this analysis. BatchGeo does what it says it does, it allows you to build a map with your data points. It is inexpensive and easy to use. It has 1 employee on Linkedin, and our guess is that this is a cool project that someone has done very well monetizing since a lot of people need to make basic maps with their data for a reasonable price. 

As we near the end of our analysis, reading the reviews of people complaining that they want BatchGeo do something specific that something else does and this doesn’t do, it underscores our hope that this analysis will help people find what they actually need, because as you know if you’ve read this far, this is a very complex space with a lot of companies that do different things. Connecting people with the right product isn’t just good for the people, it's good for the companies too. I can just imagine the guy that coded BatchGeo getting nasty emails that his App is garbage because people can’t build and balance their territories with it. Now he can just send them this analysis and sit back and crack a Corona from whatever beach he’s chillin’ on. 

• Demo: here. Full YouTube channel here

• Published price: here

Google Earth -

• Overview: Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. It’s a lot of fun. The program somehow stitches together and superimposes satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data onto a 3D globe, allowing users to see cities and landscapes from various angles. It literally gives you wings. You can basically fly like Superman. Users can explore the globe by entering addresses and coordinates, or by using a keyboard or mouse. The program can be used on a phone or tablet.

• Reference Customers: None Listed

• Potential Issues: While it’s not super clear to us how this or other GIS tools are useful to Sales Teams, it could be used to do research on prospective clients. For example, if you often have to do client visits to see something on the outside of the client’s place of business that determines if they are a good fit for you to sell to them, perhaps you can do that research with Google Earth and Panoramio. You can view photos from various places uploaded to Panoramio, information provided by Wikipedia on some locations, and Street View imagery, all of which can be great sources of information. In general, although this isn’t directly relevant, it's worth knowing that this exists, because it's a powerful and potentially useful tool for your business.  

• Demo: here

Published price: Free

(Sales Mapping Buyers Guide)