The Buyer's Guide to Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management Apps
Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management software is confusing for many reasons. It all looks similar when you’re looking at it, even though the different categories of these apps do very different things. So we published this Buyer’s Guide for route planner, sales mapping, and territory management apps for salespeople and sales management to better understand this constantly evolving space.
The Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management Software Comparison Matrix breaks down the whole space into categories, and shows who uses what App, and what they use it for:
| Category | Software Companies | What it does | User | Common Industries | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business to Business (B2B) Sales Mapping Apps | - Badger Maps, - MapAnything (Salesforce), - LeadPlotter, - Mapview, - Mapsly, - Map My Customers, - TourManager24 | Mapping and Routing for Salespeople that sell to Businesses. Helps Sales people plan their time to Focus on their best customers and save time by having efficient routes. | Field or Outside Salespeople and their Managers who sell to places of business | Medical Device, Pharmaceuticals, Construction, CPG, Business Services, Business Supplies, Home Health Care, Manufacturing, Wholesale, Distribution | “The Medical Device Rep put all the Dentists in Dallas on a Map to build their Routes and efficiently focus on their most important customers.” |
| Business to Consumer (B2C) or Door to Door (D2D) Sales Mapping Apps | - FieldRoutes, - Sales Rabbit, - OptimoRoute, - Spotio, - Canvass, - Routzy Smart Service | Mapping for Salespeople that sell to Houses, also called Door to Door Sales. Provides demographic information about the prospects living in the houses and has D2D sales management tools and sales presentation tools for the front door. Also direct physical mail campaigns. | Field or Outside Salespeople and their Managers who sell to residential homes | Residential Solar, Residential Pest Control, Political Campaigns, Home Security, Residential HVAC, Pool Maintenance, Residential Lawn Care, Plumbing, Home Cleaning | “The Solar Panel Sales Rep knew which houses on the block would be the most likely to buy because he knew who had moved into this neighborhood in the past 6 months and could see their credit scores right in the App.” |
| Territory Mapping and Design Apps | - AlignStar (Xactly), - AlignMix, - Terralign (Salesforce), - Caliper Maptitude, - Maptive, - EasyTerritory | Designs, balances, and creates sales territories. | Sales Operations or Sales Management | Beverages, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, CPG, Manufacturing, Tires, Software, Hardware | “The SalesOps team built out the territories, figured out the compensation plan, and assigned the accounts to the Sales Team using a Territory Mapping App.” |
| Trucking and Fleet Management Apps | - Circuit Route Planner, - Route4me, - RoadWarrior, - Straight Away, - RouteIQ, - Planit, | Built to solve general routing problems (often trucking, dispatch, and delivery),and can be used for sales applications. Proof of delivery, SMS notifications, ETA tracking, driver workload balancing, fleet tracking and management, stop bundling, fleet weight management optimization, left turn avoidance, driver time and break timekeeping. | Dispatchers, Schedulers, Mobile Asset Managers, Fleet Management | Trucking and Logistics, Food Delivery, Retail Distribution, Laundry and Dry Cleaning, Waste Collection, e-Commerce Delivery, Direct to Consumer Delivery, Home Services, Cable and Telecom | “We have 2,000 packages to deliver in the next 2 days across England with our 10 trucks and 14 drivers. They need to go to these locations within these time windows.” |
| GeoAnalytics / Geo Data Analytics | - Tableau, - eSpatial, - Geopointe, - Maplytics | Analyzes data on a map, assigns leads geographically, territory analysis, sales operational analysis, displays information on a map. | Marketing Team, Sales Operations Team, Data Analysts | Retail, Financial Services, Banking, Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences, Fundraising, Politics | “The marketing team needs to analyze the data on a map so they can segment our customer base and determine what cities we should focus our ad campaigns on.” |
| GIS Apps and General Mapping Apps | - ESRI, - Scribble Maps, - BatchGeo, - Google Earth | Built for any type of mapping or geographic problem, and can be used for sales applications. | Geographer, Cartographer, Geologists, Federal and State Agency Analysts, Video Game Builder, Geospatial Data Analysts. Anyone who in general needs to visualize anything on a map. | Oil and Gas, Government, Real Estate, Land Valuation, Engineering, Academia, Research, Exploration, Surveying, Construction, Marketing, Military, Store Location Planning | “The Sales Department made a map of all of our store locations for our website.” Or “The County’s GIS Engineering team mapped the power lines, sewer system, zoning data, flood planes, and soil types into layers on the map to develop a plan if the river rises more than 6 feet and help real estate developers plan their new building safely.” Or “We uploaded all our customers into Streets and Trips so that we could visualize them on a map.” |
Swipe to View Categories
Why Do You Need a Buyer's Guide?
A Buyer’s Guide is useful because the ecosystem of Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management Applications is a very confusing space. Some of the reasons this is a hard type of software to get a firm grasp on are as follow:
Categories - There are 6 different Categories of Sales Mapping Apps and 35 companies. And it's hard to tell which companies do what exactly in terms of their capabilities. They all use very similar marketing messaging (“Sales Mapping Apps will help you sell more”), and while it is true that they all help you sell more, they all help you sell more by doing different things for different users.
Marketing Creep - Sometimes a company that has always focused on one Category starts to do a little tiny bit of another Category, and their marketing materials start saying that they do both categories. Even if a company as big as Ford starts to make boats, they aren’t going to compete with MasterCraft on the open ocean anytime soon (this actually happened, true story). This is pretty common in software in general because the people that do the marketing are told to bring more eyeballs to the site, and they do this by making the product seem relevant to a broader audience.
They All Look the Same - Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management software all have something in common. They all have maps. The functionality is all built in a geographic interface where data is displayed on a map along with other functions that allow you to perform different business functions. There is a lot of feature overlap, but when you dig into the actual workflows, it becomes apparent that these different companies are doing different things for different users on top of maps.
Mergers - Some companies that are in one Category of Sales Mapping Apps have bought companies that are in another Category, but then they have put them under the same name, when really, they are two separate apps with the same name that you buy together or separately.
We decided to compile a Buyer’s Guide to clear this confusion up and to help Sales Teams get where they wanted to go. There is not one App that fills every sales mapping need, so sales teams need to figure out which apps from which categories will help them the most. At MatrixPlace, we’ve been working with Sales Teams since 2015, and we’ve seen a ton of them benefit from different types of Mapping Apps. However, we realized that the Sales Mapping App space was very confusing for a Sales Leader who is just starting to look at the different types of tools available to them.
After we built a focused version of this analysis for one use case, we decided to make this broader guide to pass on some of what we’ve learned over the years and make it available to everyone. Of course, if you like our analysis here, we’d love for you to take a few minutes to look at what we do at MatrixPlace to support Sales Teams with our Marketing Consulting Services:
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We make your email marketing campaigns effortless (for you). Our proprietary process uses a complex matrix of data, software and GDPR compliant practices, that yields the best possible deliverability. We execute a sequence of emails to generate new Marketing Qualified Leads for your Sale team.
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We make your inbound marketing campaigns more effective. We help you build the digital framework to attract new Marketing Qualified Leads for your Sales team. While this is complex, we simplify it with our proven process.
Our Methodology for Evaluating Sales Mapping Apps
We initially did this evaluation as a part of a consulting engagement where a large customer of ours wanted us to do a full analysis of the Sales Mapping space. We learned a ton about the mapping tools in the process of doing this research. Our research team did anonymous trials of products so we wouldn’t get special treatment and could actually evaluate the experience from a customer's perspective. We talked directly to our customers about what kinds of mapping apps they were using and what their results were. We sifted through publicly available information. We spoke directly with the companies to hear what they had to say about their products and the space. We evaluated review sites to see what other actual users had to say about their experiences and what they had found.
In general, we found that it was impressive how far this space has come since we first started looking at it 10 years ago, and how truly advanced some of the tools are. A Sales Team can really get their Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management problems solved today. The results and automation a Sales Team can get from these solutions can save them time and money, which in the end means the Sales Team can sell more. If you don’t give them a map, your Sales Team is truly flying blind!
Tips and Tricks to Buying a Sales Mapping App:
Don’t just get a demo, get a free trial of the product and see it working in the real world, not just in the sandbox. Preferably with your data in the trial to verify compatibility of formats and CRMs. Some products are a lot easier for sales teams to use from a user experience perspective. And sometimes these tools are made for specific types of teams who sell in specific types of ways or to specific industries. You want to make sure you get this in your hands so that you can really “kick the tires” and make sure it's the right fit for YOUR team.
Also, ask to see the integration or connector working with a sample account... Meaning you change an attribute in the mapping App and then have it show up in the CRM or ERP that you would want to connect. For example, change a customer’s phone number in the Mapping App and see the new phone number shows up in the CRM. There were a lot of complaints and feedback that we found online about connectors to CRMs and ERPs not working as well as they should. The way to minimize deployment risk here is to see the integration running. To do that, when the software company tells you they have an integration, they will almost always have it running on a sample account. For example, let's just say you have Zoho CRM and they say they have a connector. You can reduce your risk by just saying, “Great, can you show me a live demo of your App running on this CRM?” This isn’t as good as doing a trial on your data, but if they can’t demo it, that means they would have to build a connector custom for you, which can work (or can not work). This is a quick first step to reducing risk.
There is a ton of great information available on the review sites, but there is so much information that you have to go through it carefully and systematically. Our charts in the Category sections summarize the results, but it’s also worth looking deeper at the ratings on different review sites. Some of our favorite review sites are G2 Crowd, Software Advice, Capterra, GetApp, Crozdesk, Google Reviews, the Google Play Store, and the Apple App Store. We gathered some of the overall reviews and made them available within this article, but you can dig as deep as you want on the actual review pages. We also have the individual companies reviews pages on these different review sites linked out of that document. Finally, we recommend that you take a close look at when people report negative or average experiences on the sites, you can see what they say and how the company responds, as it's a datapoint on how they take care of their customers.
One thing that jumps out from evaluating all these companies is that there is sometimes a big difference in the ratings between the reviews sites for the same company. One major reason for this is that there are mobile focused review sites like the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. Other sites will get reviews from mobile and browser based users like Software Advice, G2, and Capterra. As a result, companies that have focused more on the browser version of their App than the mobile version will do better on Software Advice and Capterra than they will on the Apple App Store or Google Play. This doesn’t matter if your user is a Sales Operations person working at their computer, but it's very important if the user is out in the field on their phone or tablet, as many users of mapping apps are. Also, you’ll notice some sites like G2 Crowd and Crozdesk ask a lot more questions, go a lot more in depth, and categorize the different types of software more granularly - while on other sites there is very little depth or categorization.
Understanding Integrations
We found in our research that most companies say they can integrate to everything - which is technically true, but not all connectors are created equal. Let’s get into the weeds on this because it's really important to the success of your deployment of Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management Apps. Note: If your customer data is just in an excel spreadsheet and you are planning on using your Sales Mapping App as your system of record (because you don’t have or don’t use a CRM), then you just have to upload your spreadsheet into the Sales Mapping App and you can skip this section on integrations.
Here are the buzzword definitions you’ll hear thrown around when people are talking about integrations, along with the key information of why this is important to a Sales Team:
Application Programming Interface (APIs) - Like phone lines that allow two pieces of software to communicate with each other. APIs can be used to read or write data, and can be linked together to create an integration. The major downside to API integrations is that they require development resources to build initially and maintain (keep working). These usually involve ongoing consultants or ongoing IT interactions and can be fairly involved projects, depending on the complexity and data needs. API integrations are also transactional, not Bulk (see definition below). Zapier integrations (see definition below) are API integrations managed by Zapier.
Zapier - A company that makes a fancy User Interface (UI) or wrapper around APIs. This helps you set up two apps to communicate data back and forth with one another. You pay by your metered usage, called transactions. Depending on how much data moves back and forth in a given period, this can become cost ineffective compared to a Native integration because you are being charged for each transaction.
A Zapier integration is not generally 2-Way (although you can potentially set up two Zapier integrations, one going each direction), and Zapier integrations are not native. Zapier connections also don’t support Bulk updates or synchronization operations. They communicate with a stream of transactions. There are added points of failure with a Non-Native integration because the information is streaming through multiple platforms. Native integrations are considered a core piece of Sales Mapping Software, so you get better support that addresses the specific data needs you have.
Native Integration - This Integration is built and supported by the Sales Mapping Company and connects Directly, as opposed to transactionally with Zapier. Native integrations are more reliable, consistent, and keep each system up-to-date in near Real-Time, even with very large changes in either system. It minimizes the costs of needing developer resources or paying per task through third party integration platforms.
Real-Time Integration - Updates are instantaneous or every few minutes so the data is up to date in both systems in near Real-Time.
2-Way Integration or Bi-Directional - Changes made to your customer data in either the CRM or ERP will be updated in the Sales Mapping App and it also goes the other way, so changes made in the Sales Mapping App will be reflected in your CRM or ERP.
While Native integrations are generally 2-Way, users can run into problems on this with API and Zapier integrations which need to be built out both ways if you want to be able to update information on both sides. If you have a one directional integration, the data will get out of sync in one application. For example, if you're not sending data from the CRM to the Sales Mapping software, then your marketing team can’t add a new lead list to the CRM because if they add it there, the reps won’t see the accounts on their map. But if you don’t have the Sales Mapping Software sending information to the CRM, then reps in the field can’t update information or gather new data in the field. To solve this problem, you have to build out the communication both ways to get the information from one system to the other. So you build one Zapier integration to send information from the CRM to the Sales Mapping App and another Zapier integration to send information from the Sales Mapping App to the CRM. But this requires costly developer resources, so a 2-Way, Native integration is a better solution if you have these needs.
Also, API and Zapier integrations have to be maintained, and they can be costly to maintain, because the skills required to keep them running and make changes to them are highly compensated skills whether you have the person on your IT staff or hire a consultant. Additionally, CRMs have API limits that cost money and Zapier costs money per task. These costs can add up quickly if you are making changes between systems. And you can bump into these limits when a lot changes. That being said, if Native integrations to your CRM are not an option, then API or Zapier are the next best thing. All Sales Mapping Apps use FTP or Zapier or API integrations that are not native at least some of the time, because there are hundreds of CRM systems, and no one has built Native integrations to all of them. The trick is to get an App that has a great integration with your CRM, ERP, or wherever you keep your data.
Bulk Integration - An integration with Bulk functionality. Data is synchronized in Bulk (for example one spreadsheet of data at a time) instead of as a one directional push of a single object (for example one row in the spreadsheet at a time). This is important in many ways, for example when you make changes to the structure of your data like adding a field or mass updating many specific values at once (for example updating a field about many customers at one time to say that they are a priority customer). Another reason this is important is when first setting up your Sales Mapping Software, you will need to somehow get your data into it. Using a Bulk integration is usually less time consuming and allows greater flexibility.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) - A standard way for servers to transfer files. Here it is used to move updated data files about your customers from one place (like your CRM or customer database) to your Sales Mapping App. FTP integrations are Bulk but they are not Real-Time (typically they are scheduled to automatically run once per day).
Summary - what to consider as you evaluate integrations:
If you just need to push a few changes at a time between systems and can cover the cost per change, then use Zapier.
If you need to push a lot of changes at a time between systems on an infrequent basis (like once per day), and you can push and pull files to and from FTP, then use an FTP integration.
If you have more complex use cases or data needs and have developer resources available, then use an API integration.
Native, 2-Way, Real-Time integrations work out-of-the-box with very little setup. If the software already has one built for your data source, a deployment should take about a week. These are the integrations you need if you need to keep your data up-to-date in both places in near Real-Time.
Bulk functionality is important if you need to update the data many records at a time or add multiple records to the account list at once.
How to evaluate or test that an integration works for you:
Edit a custom field value in both systems, make sure changes are reflected in CRM (or ERP, or Database, etc). Note the time and make sure the lag is acceptable. 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours, and 5 days are very different when you think about the workflows you can execute in both systems.
Create a new account and activity / check-in in both systems, make sure it shows up in CRM.
Custom object types in CRM show up, and you can perform the above tests plus see them on the map, add them to a route, add them to a territory, etc, depending on the type of Sales Mapping App you are evaluating.
You get the same experience with various accounts and check-ins / activities and features in mobile. For example: Verify that you are able to execute routes on mobile and include accounts on the route that are just added to your CRM. Or, for a Territory Design App, make sure that when you add new accounts to CRM that they can be easily assigned to a territory and then will show up on the sales reps’ mobile experience.
Check that you can update many accounts at once in your CRM and those changes show up in the sales mapping App in near Real-Time. This often happens when the marketing team gets a new list of 1000 leads and wants them uploaded into CRM and the sales team wants them to show up in the Sales Mapping Software. This is a common point of failure for Non-Native integrations or Zapier integrations.
If you are using a Zapier integration, verify the API costs in terms of ‘Zaps’ and factor this into the total cost of ownership.
Remember to test the App out with the people that will be using the App. For example don’t just test with the management team or the IT team if the App will ultimately be used by the sales team.
Test the App in the way your users will be using the App. For example, don’t have an employee that will be using the App in the field on their mobile device test the App on their computer. Have them test the App in the field on their mobile device and get a feel for the workflow on that device.
Deep-Dive Category Analysis
of Sales Mapping, Routing, and Territory Management Apps
Now we begin our in-depth analysis of the different software options available within each of the categories:
1) Business-to-Business (B2B) Sales Mapping Apps
Category Summary:
The apps in this category are built for field sales teams that are selling to businesses. They have capabilities that are crucial to field sales teams that sell to businesses like mapping, routing, scheduling, data capture, lead generation, CRM integration. These apps help outside sales people plan their time to focus on their best customers and save time and be more efficient. The people that usually use it are Field or Outside Salespeople and their Managers in industries like Medical Device, Pharmaceuticals, Construction, CPG, Business Services, Business Supplies, Home Health Care, Manufacturing, Wholesale, and Distribution.
There are several companies in this space that are all doing very similar things but optimized for slightly different use cases, at different price points, and at varying levels of quality. Some companies are focused on their mobile App for use on iPhones, Androids, and tablets. Some companies are focused on their browser based App for use on the laptop. Some do both. Make sure that as you evaluate the Apps in this Category, you keep in mind how your sales reps will use it. For example, don’t just evaluate the browser version if your reps are in the field and will be using this on their phones. Don’t just evaluate the Apps on the tablet if half the team doesn’t carry their tablets.
Because these companies have segmented the market and pursued different types of users, it's important that you do a trial to try out these B2B Sales mapping apps before you make a purchase. They don't all work in the same way and they all won’t be a good fit for everyone’s needs. The trial ensures that the App will work in a way that actually works for you. Our best advice is to do a quick initial analysis by getting a free trial, adding a handful of points in your area, and actually going out and running a route on your mobile device (even if you only drive a mile and visit 5 points along the way). Essentially, use it the way your sales team will use it. Then when you’ve boiled it down to your top choices, do a full trial with reps in the field with your data uploaded or integrated.
As with all these categories of apps, we also recommend buying it month to month at first and making sure you can get it all set up to your liking. And then switching to annual and getting the annual discount after a few months of successful use, because there have been challenges reported with successful deployments in this space, so the successful full trial and month to month purchase will lower your purchase risk. The small extra marginal cost of the month to month charge over the annual is worth it for peace of mind and risk reduction, because there have been complaints about some companies in this category. There have also been reports of high pressure tactics and try to get you to commit to purchase before you get to do a live trial on your data. You can always push back and get the full trial so that you know you are getting what you need.
These apps often allow you to import a CSV (comma separated value) file of your customer and prospect data. Also, because B2B sales teams often have a CRM, many of these Apps can integrate with your CRM system so that they can send data gathered in the field to the CRM, and display the information in the CRM in a mapping environment. There are complaints about the CRM integrations in some cases, so a trial is an important thing to do, so that the company can prove to you that they have a functional integration for the way you use your CRM.
These products are built for companies that sell to other companies with field sales teams. Core capabilities include:
Routing
Mapping
Scheduling
Reports for Management
Lead Generation
Data Gathering from the field
CRM integration
(B2B Vendor Comparison)
1I) Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Sales Mapping Apps
Category Summary:
These apps are built for companies who have sales people that sell to people’s houses. These apps are called Business to Consumer (B2C) and sometimes called ‘Door to Door’ or D2D apps. There are many features and characteristics that make the software in this category that make it perfect and customized for the experience of walking around a neighborhood selling to people’s houses.
Features include knowing the data about the people behind the door you are about to knock on. You can use this information to identify homes and areas where your ideal customers live and focus your canvassing efforts where they’re going to be most productive. This allows you to only knock on the doors where you are most likely to get a sale. Get instant access to homeowner and rental resident information so that you can quickly find qualified buyers. B2C Mapping Apps provide dozens of data points, including owner vs. renter info, homeowner income, or soft credit score.
But the information about the house can go deeper than that. Perhaps you are selling solar panels and you’d like to know the square footage of the roof, or even which direction the roof is pointed so that you know if there is enough sun exposure to make a solar panel make economic sense before you even walk up the driveway. Save time by efficiently routing around a neighborhood only hitting the best houses for your product.
Remember the more you know about your prospect, the more you can help them. You can give smarter pitches tailored to the prospect before you have even met. In cases where there are multiple members of the household, you’ll have better insight into the home dynamic to better determine who are the breadwinners and decision makers. This knowledge allows you to approach the sale more strategically.
Some apps in the B2C category can even coordinate your door knocks with a physical mail campaign, so the prospective customers are primed to speak with your sales representatives.
Also, B2C apps can help you automate tedious back office work with a mobile App that captures data on the fly. You can create invoices for new or repeat customers in the field, and collect signatures for purchase. Some apps are even able to collect payments right in the app, and set up autobills for hassle-free future payments. You can also access presentations and marketing materials for prospects right from your mobile device.
From a team management perspective, you can better understand the results from your reps in the field, and monitor their progress in Real-Time. This helps managers make better decisions. Some B2C apps help management by providing charts and graphs on the data being collected in the field.
Note that there has been some confusion online from users between this category, B2C, and the category where company’s salespeople sell to Businesses or B2B, another category in this analysis. Although on the face of it, it seems pretty clear which one you need: If you walk around selling to people in houses, you need an app from the B2C category. If you drive around and sell to businesses, you need an app from the B2B category. But it can actually be a little tricky to tell what category is right for you, because sometimes even in the same industry, for example solar, sometimes the best App for a company could be from the B2B category, and sometimes the B2C category, and sometimes even at the same company. For example, a solar company that is selling to businesses, and has sales cycles with business customers, would likely want an App from the B2B category. But the same solar company could have a different set of reps that are selling to people’s houses, and they would probably want an App from the B2C category. Fortunately, it's pretty rare that a company is selling with an outside sales team to both businesses and people’s houses, so it's generally easy to see which type of software you need.
There are also edge cases where a company sells to businesses the way people usually sell to houses, meaning they walk down the street trying to sell something like water to every business. They may want a B2C software even though they were selling to businesses because they are walking to cover a small area and selling to almost every business. And there are also times when sales reps that are selling to houses are actually behaving in a way that is closer to sales reps that sell to businesses.
For example if you were selling life insurance to people in their homes, but not knocking on most doors in a neighborhood, but by appointment all over the city so you were driving between set appointments on your schedule. They would want B2B software even though they were selling to houses. A little confusing, but when in doubt, watch a demo video from a couple companies from each category, and you’ll quickly see which one supports the workflows that will support your business processes. As you can see from the ratings, a good place to start is to watch the demo videos from Salesforce Maps, Badger Maps, and MapView for the B2B category, and FieldRoutes, OptimoRoute, and SalesRabbit in the B2C category. That will give you a solid understanding of the different capabilities of these different types of software, and which type is best for you.
(B2C Vendor Comparison)
III. Territory Building and Design Apps
Category Summary:
The software in this category is used to design, balance, and create sales territories for teams of sales reps. The software supports sales management in its often annual decision of where to draw lines on the map to define where one sales rep stops working and another starts. As anyone who has had to make these decisions knows, there is a lot that goes into this, and there are major ramifications with retention, fairness, and compensation of the sales team. If you have 100 sales reps in the USA, and you need to break up the USA into 100 parts you need to take into account things like territory size, current and potential revenue coming out of the territory, territory shape, where your reps live, territory growth, history, and what reps currently own the relationships with what customer, product mix of the territory, how much work each territory needs, and many other things. Some of this work can be automated, some often needs to be adjusted by hand for situations where the data doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.
Sometimes the territories are being designed for field sales reps, sometimes for inside sales reps. Any industry that has sales reps needs to manage their territories. Often it is not the sales rep using the software in this category, but instead it's someone in Sales Operations or Sales Management.
Sales Leaders can build territories with the ability to balance attributes and demographics for each rep based on geographic data, demographic data, revenue, customer base, and prospect potential. Managers can also take into account drive time, drive distance, and straight-line distances as you build territories that make sense. And they can manually or automatically create, add, move, or split territories by drawing boundary lines. They can also add and edit territories using lines from features such as zip codes, area codes, county lines, roads, railroads, or rivers. Get insights into the territory data, and make decisions about how to adjust the territory in Real-Time throughout the year.
When they build territories, managers need to visualize customer and prospect potential in order to place sales reps in the highest concentration locations. They also need to ensure that territories are built fairly, so that every rep has an equal opportunity to succeed. If the sales team perceives the territories to be unfair, or spends time squabbling about which account belongs to who, it can really drag down efficiency. Also, if top performers feel like their territory is unfair, you could lose them to competitors. So fairness and transparency are critical here.
If you build territories well, you also cut down on travel times and windshield time, not to mention gas costs. This software pairs well with B2B or B2C apps, depending on who your team sells to. Territory Building software often integrates with your CRM, so that you can make adjustments that will be reflected in your CRM automatically.
One challenge with this space is that you often can’t rely on free trials to determine if it's a good fit for you the way you can with some of the other categories. This actually isn’t crazy when you think about it, because a lot of companies only look at their territories alignment once a year, so if free trials were allowed, you could just do a trial once a year and never pay the company. So expect to feel like you are taking a bit of a leap of faith here, and generally expect only annual pricing.
This is a relatively difficult space for us to evaluate, because we generally can’t use the software, because they want you to buy it first. And there aren’t many ratings in the online sites, or they are all relatively high so aren’t great to compare with one another. Some companies are very small in terms of number of employees, which makes us nervous about how well their products work, because this is solving a complex problem. So if you do purchase them and try them out, please leave reviews of your experiences for others to benefit from.
This category breaks down in a few distinct subcategories:
Large firms with that focus on other types of software or consulting services like Salesforce Maps, Alignstar from Xactly, and Anaplan
General Mapping tools that have a fair amount of overlap with the GIS Apps and General Mapping Apps like Caliper Mapitude.
Small companies that focus on territory building and alignment like EasyTerritory, Maptive, and Alignmix
Your specific needs probably determine that one or the other of these categories is the best fit for you.
(Territory Mapping Vendor Comparison)
IV. Trucking and Fleet Management Apps
Category Summary:
These apps are built to solve general routing problems that dispatchers, schedulers, Mobile Asset Managers, and Fleet Managers often face. These are commonly used in industries like Trucking and Logistics, Food Delivery, Retail Distribution, Laundry and Dry Cleaning, Waste Collection, e-Commerce Delivery, Direct to Consumer Delivery, Home Services, Cable and Telecom. The different companies in this category have focused on different areas of the market, even if sometimes their marketing language sounds very similar, so it’s best to try out the ones that you like before you make a purchase.
This category is especially sensitive to what device your use case is for. Some apps do better on Android, some iOS, and some the browser. This may be a reflection of where their customer base resides, as these different platforms are more popular in different parts of the world.
Although this analysis is focused on Sales Mapping Software, because these companies advertise that they have expanded from trucking and fleets to sales people, they are important to include here, and discuss how they are relevant to sales people. In general, these products are built for delivery drivers who drive trucks and vans with the goal of making deliveries. So while there is some feature overlap (like building routes), if you are using this for sales, you will find some things missing and some things that are not relevant for you.
If you have repeated interactions with a customer that you are managing, as opposed to a one time delivery this is probably not for you. However, if all your customers are a one time interaction, and even though you are in sales you ‘act like’ a delivery driver, this could be the best choice for you. But usually, if you are using these products for sales and you are not a delivery driver then this is probably a square peg round hole situation. Even though this analysis is primarily from the sales perspective and we are a sales consulting firm so trucking is outside of our area of expertise, we’ll do our best to compare these, but the disclaimer is that no one on this team has deep knowledge of the trucking, shipping, or delivery industry.
One other thing that is worth noting about this trucking and fleet space is that there are a very unusual number of reviews in the App stores, compared to the other platforms. If you look closely at a company like Circuit Routes, it’s suspicious that they would have 77,937 reviews on the Google Play store, and then have 0 reviews on G2 crowd and 22 reviews on Capterra, both major review sites. If they had the kinds of revenue numbers that would generate that number of reviews based on their sales price, it seems like these would be much larger companies. For example if we just assumed that 1 out of every 3 customers that used Circuit Route Planner left a review on the Android store (which would be unheard of), then they would have 240,000 customers and at their price point of $33 a month. This would conservatively be an annual revenue of $95 million, which would mean they would likely be a public company with thousands of employees. But they have 24 employees listed on Linkedin, so something strange is going on. This is a similar case with Circuit Route Planner, Route4me, and RoadWarrior who are all direct competitors with one another, and the major players in this category. We don’t know how to account for why this would happen, but it throws the review results on the App Store in this category into question. Our recommendation is that as a prospective consumer of these products, definitely do a trial, as that is truly the best way to judge if an App will work for you.
(Fleet Management Vendor Comparison)
V. GeoAnalytics / Geo Data Analytics
Category Summary:
With GeoAnalytics software, you can analyze data on a map, assign leads geographically, territory analysis, sales operational analysis, and display information on a map. Sales leaders need to analyze and visualize data to make better decisions, and often that data is geographic in nature, meaning that there is an address or a latitude and longitude associated with the data.
GeoAnalytics software enables sales leaders to take their customer and prospect data and view it in a map, geocode it, and analyze it. There are many sales applications to being able to give your sales analysts and sales operations team access to powerful mapping tools, from analyzing where you should apply more focus and uncovering opportunities, to analysis on how you could serve your customers more effectively, to better understanding your customers and their businesses, evaluate performance against quota, better understand the impact of changing sales incentives, build dashboards that enable faster and better decisions, account tracking, quarterly results, top accounts, opportunity overview, opportunity tracking, and marketing leads - all in a map based, geographic environment.
(GeoAnalytics Vendor Comparison)
VI. GIS Apps and General Mapping Apps
Cateogry Summary:
A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of software that allows you to analyze, visualize, and manipulate geographic data. Geographic information systems are used in many industries like Oil and Gas, Government, Real Estate, Land Valuation, Engineering, Academia, Research, Exploration, Surveying, Construction, Marketing, Military, and Store Location Planning.
Often the focus is the ability to relate different sets of geographic data, often described in ‘layers’. So for example, it's useful to know where the rivers are at (a layer of measurable geographic data), flood plains are located (another layer), water table starts (another layer), as well as understand where the drainage pipes are at (another layer) and the water pipes are at (another layer), and also where the power lines are at (another layer). Your customer data could be structured like this in certain industries, for example if your customers were oil companies.
We included General Mapping Apps like BatchGeo in this group as well.
(GIS/General Mapping Vendor Comparison)
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many Sales Mapping Apps that could help your sales team today. Your company may benefit from more than one type.
For example, at the same company, you may want: A GeoAnalytics App for your Marketing Team to focus their advertising, a Territory App to figure out the best way to break up the country into fair territories for your sales team, and for your Sales team, a Business to Business (B2B) App if you sell to businesses.
We hope that this analysis has been helpful and that you can better evaluate and solve your mapping needs. There are huge benefits for sales organizations to using Sales Mapping Applications discussed and analyzed here…
And at MatrixPlace Marketing Consulting we are here to help!
Published by:
Preston Hurd has spent his career enabling sales teams to generate leads with technology. He is an expert in the MarTech field and his area of focus has been helping sales teams fill their pipelines with New Leads, in order to generate revenue.
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The 6 Categories of Sales Mapping Apps
1) Territory Mapping and Design Apps:
Companies that do this: AlignStar from Xactly, Terralign from Salesforce Maps, AlignMix, Caliper Maptitude, Maptive, EasyTerritory
What does it do: Designs, balances, and creates sales territories.
User: Sales Operations or Sales Management
Common Industries: Beverages, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, CPG, Manufacturing, Tires, Software, Hardware
Example: “The SalesOps team built out the territories, figured out the comp plan, and assigned the accounts to the Sales Team using a Territory Mapping App.”
2) GeoAnalytics / Geo Data Analytics:
Companies that do this: Geopointe, Maplytics, Tableau, eSpatial, Mapsly
What does it do: Analyze data on a map, assign leads geographically, territory analysis, sales operational analysis, display information on a map
User: Marketing Team, Sales Operations Team, Data Analysts
Common Industries: Retail, Financial Services, Banking, Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences, Fundraising, Politics
Example: “The marketing team needs to analyze the data on a map so they can segment our customer base and determine what cities we should focus our ad campaigns on.”
3) Business to Business (B2B) Sales Mapping Apps:
Companies that do this: Badger Maps, MapAnything from Salesforce Maps, LeadPlotter, Mapview, Map My Customers, TourManager24
What does it do: Mapping and Routing for Salespeople that sell to Businesses. Helps Sales people plan their time to Focus on their best customers and save time by having efficient routes.
User: Field or Outside Salespeople and their Managers who sell to places of business
Common Industries: Medical Device, Pharmaceuticals, Construction, CPG, Business Services, Business Supplies, Home Health Care, Manufacturing, Wholesale, Distribution
Example: “The Medical Device Rep put all the Dentists in Dallas on a Map to build her Routes and efficiently focus on her most important customers.”
4) Business to Consumer (B2C) or Door to Door (D2D) Sales Mapping Apps:
Companies that do this: FieldRoutes, Sales Rabbit, Spotio, Canvass, OptimoRoute, Routzy Smart Service
What does it do: Mapping for Salespeople that sell to Houses, also called Door to Door Sales. Provides demographic information about the prospects living in the houses and has D2D sales management tools and sales presentation tools for the front door. Also direct physical mail campaigns.
User: Field or Outside Salespeople and their Managers who sell to residential homes
Common Industries: Residential Solar, Residential Pest Control, Political Campaigns, Home Security, Residential HVAC, Pool Maintenance, Residential Lawn Care, Plumbing, Home Cleaning
Example: “The Solar Panel Sales Rep knew which houses on the block would be the most likely to buy because he knew who had moved into this neighborhood in the past 6 months and could see their credit scores right in the App.”
5) Route and Fleet Management Apps:
Companies that do this: Route4me, RoadWarrior, Planit, Circuit Route Planner, RouteIQ, Straight Away
What does it do: Built to solve general routing problems (often trucking, dispatch, and delivery), and can be used for sales applications. proof of delivery, SMS notifications, ETA tracking, driver workload balancing, fleet tracking and management, stop bundling, fleet weight management optimization, left turn avoidance, driver time and break timekeeping.
User: Dispatchers, Schedulers, Mobile Asset Managers, Fleet Management
Common Industries: Trucking and Logistics, Food Delivery, Retail Distribution, Laundry and Dry Cleaning, Waste Collection, e-Commerce Delivery, Direct to Consumer Delivery, Home Services, Cable and Telecom
Example: “We have 2,000 packages to deliver in the next 2 days across England with our 10 trucks and 14 drivers. They need to go to these locations within these time windows”
6) GIS Apps and General Mapping Apps:
Companies that do this: ESRI, Scribble Maps, MapPoint, Streets and Trips, BatchGeo, Google Earth
What does it do: Built for any type of mapping or geographic problem, and can be used for sales applications.
User: Geographer, Cartographer, Geologists, Federal and State Agency Analysts, Video Game Builder, Geospatial Data Analysts. Anyone who in general needs to visualize anything on a map.
Common Industries: Oil and Gas, Government, Real Estate, Land Valuation, Engineering, Academia, Research, Exploration, Surveying, Construction, Marketing, Military, Store Location Planning.
Example: “The Sales Department made a map of all of our store locations for our website.” Or “The County’s GIS Engineering team mapped the power lines, sewer system, zoning data, flood planes, and soil types into layers on the map to develop a plan if the river rises more than 6 feet and help real estate developers plan their new building safely.” Or “We uploaded all our customers into Streets and Trips so that we could visualize them on a map.”