After the release, you will see three options when you start to create a new territory alignment.



Here’s how to choose which option is right for you:  

• Create Areas Manually: Choose this button if you plan to manually select territory areas such as ZIP Codes, Counties or States to create your territories.  
• Areas From File: If you have a spreadsheet with your ZIPs, Counties or States assigned to a territory, use this option. You can overlay your points based or account information afterward with this option.  
• Points From File: This is a new territory type. If you assign points to territories that don’t fit within a defined geographic area, this option is for you. This new method is great for companies who assign salespeople to key accounts, industries, specializations, parent accounts or other criteria beyond geographic area.   



Points-based territories can be created with hierarchies, and you’ll still be able to balance on any metric in your data.  

eSpatial makes regular updates and we always appreciate hearing your feedback. If you have any thoughts, please let us know through the in-product chat. 

The post Update: New point-only territory alignment option appeared first on eSpatial.

According to Tourism Ireland, 11.3 million tourists visited the Island of Ireland in 2019. With Covid-19, the figures for 2020 were much lower. However, with the re-opening of businesses and travel being promoted, mapping your next vacation is on everyone’s mind. Below is a map of Accommodation and attractions/ activities across the Island or Ireland:

Co. Kerry – A Case Study:



Kerry — also known as “The Kingdom” — is in the southwest corner of Ireland. It is a hotspot for tourist activity, with 30% of all tourists and holiday makers staying in this part of the country in 2019. With Kerry being such a popular county to visit, we’ve carried out a small investigation to assess the spread and proximity of hotel accommodation and attractions across the county.

From carrying out a handful of spatial operations from within eSpatial, we were able to draw several conclusions:



Hot spot heat map of accommodation in Co. Kerry.



Activities/attractions within 5 miles of accommodation.

Key Findings:

• Three hotels have 128 activities within a 5-mile radius
• The overall average distance of an activity/attraction to a hotel is 1.62 miles
• 89% of all activities/attractions in Kerry are within a 5-mile radius of a hotel

With such a high density of hotels and exciting activities and attractions, it’s no wonder that Kerry is a go-to destination for both international visitors and those looking to plan their staycation this year.

*Data was sourced from Open Data NI (This HERoNI data is based on OSNI IP and licensed under the Open Government Licence 3.0.) and Data.gov.ie (https://data.gov.ie/)

The post Travelling in Ireland? Here’s how mapping can help appeared first on eSpatial.

This eSpatial update was released on July 25, 2021.

This summer, we will release a new update focused on improving eSpatial’s Territory Manager. We want to make it easier for you to get the exact results you need, so these changes will give you more insight and control over how you align and optimize your territories.

This update will span both standard and advanced territory features and will make it possible to use Territory Optimizer in Canada and the UK, in addition to the US. A few of the major changes include:

Work index for balancing your territories

Many companies need to take workload into account when balancing their territories. Whether workload is the sole metric or just part of the picture, this option is important for creating balanced, manageable territory alignments.

To help you accomplish this easily and accurately, we’ve added a new balance option called work index. This metric reflects the amount of effort required to service each territory, and is calculated based on call frequency, call duration and travel time. You can set the call duration and frequency, while eSpatial provides the travel time. By splitting your accounts into A, B and C datasets, you can customize the frequency and duration even further.

Work index can be used combined with other balances to create the territory alignment model that works best for your business.



Detailed selection and assignment

To streamline the territory management process, we’re adding a new selection and assignment system. The new tool will allow you to bulk select points, see a detailed breakdown of what you have chosen, and re-assign them to a new area. You’ll no longer have to select “allow reassign”, and will be able to remove individual accounts, ZIPs or other areas before assigning the rest.

This new workflow gives you increased visibility and control over your accounts and territory alignments.





More insights in your customizable territory panel

We’re also introducing a new sortable and customizable territory panel. This will allow you to view multiple balances at once, sort your territories and the included columns. Customizing this panel will allow you to see exactly what you need in a glance.



Undo and redo buttons

By popular demand, we have also added undo and redo buttons to Territory Manager. This will allow you to go backwards or forwards up to five actions, making it easier to tweak, change and get the best results.

New Territory Optimizer options

Territory Optimizer is a premium feature, and we’ve added even more functionality to streamline your territory alignment process.

• Use optimizer in the UK and Canada: It will now be possible to use Territory Optimizer in Canada and the UK, in addition to the US. We’ve expanded our available optimizer datasets to include UK postcode sectors, districts and areas, as well as Canadian Forward Sortation Areas (FSAs) and Canadian Census Divisions.
• Additional hierarchy capability: You will now be able to optimize your territory alignments on up to three hierarchy levels.
• Calculate territory centers: This new feature will generate a center for each territory. The center can be calculated as the geographic center of the territory or influenced by your balance data such as value of accounts or work to service the territory.

Salesforce Reports – Scheduled Updates

We already support all the standard Salesforce objects including leads, account opportunities, reports as well as any custom objects that include location information. In this release we are adding the ability to schedule the update of your Salesforce datasets, primarily your Salesforce Reports, so that they can be updated daily or weekly to keep your maps up to date.

Updated datasets

We will be adding a new ZIP code dataset for use in you maps and territories. This will be updated more frequently that our current ZIP Code Tabulations Areas (ZCTA) option. However, ZCTAs will still be available for those who prefer to use them.

We update eSpatial several times a year, and your feedback helps us continue to improve. If you have any thoughts about this update or what you would like to see in the future, let us know through the in-app or website chat.

The post Update: Streamlining Your Territory Management Experience appeared first on eSpatial.

But when this sort of thing gets in the way of understanding a critical concept, it’s time to nip it in the bud. For example, the terms “route optimization” and “route planning” might sound more or less similar, but they’re quite different. And the former will be far more valuable than the latter to your sales and service teams. Let’s take a look:

How is route optimization different from route planning?

There are two answers to this question – one literal, the other more related to the changing business environment.

Let’s start with the first. Route planning is the act of plotting a route on a map with a starting and ending point. If applicable, this can also include notes of any stops that have to be made along the way.

By contrast, route optimization means not only creating a route but also working to make it efficient. The goal is to reach as many stops (and attend to as many clients) as possible while reducing drive time. Because the goal is also to provide quality service at each stop, you can’t focus entirely on drive time, especially in sales or on service calls. Some customers will need longer meetings than others.

The other main difference between route planning and route optimization is modernity. Basically, planning is old-fashioned, suited to the traveling-salesman era of decades past. Route optimization, on the other hand, is essential to any modern organization. It’s the way of the future.



Who benefits the most from route optimization?

This is another question with a short answer and a longer one. The short and simple answer is “any company or organization with teams that spend any significant amount of time on the road.” And that’s certainly true, but there’s a little more to it:

• Outside sales teams whose reps must cover territories with a large number of customers in a densely populated but limited geographical area — e.g. in or around any major city in the U.S. — benefit from optimization. These teams aren’t covering long distances, but with some many potential routes, it’s difficult to choose the most efficient one. This can lead to doubling back, crossing over, and generally slowing down the process.
• Organizations providing logistics or delivery services need to make the daily routes of their drivers as efficient as possible. Especially in companies that guarantee shipping within a specific timeframe. Delivery problems are among the most common customer service complaints, so minimizing them is always a good idea.
• Service technicians must thread a similar needle. Customers who need their hot water heater looked at or their internet service restored (to name just a few potential businesses) want someone to get there as soon as possible. But on arrival, they also want technicians to spend as much time as necessary to address the problem.

There are many more situations where route optimization can help your business. If your company has a sales, service, delivery or other road team, you can apply route optimization.

Mastering route optimization with eSpatial

It’s possible to calculate optimized routes with consumer mapping tools, but it’s more difficult and time consuming. You need a versatile and leading-edge data visualization and mapping solution like eSpatial that can handle these tasks in seconds.

Key features of the software that make it ideal for your route optimization needs include:

• Automation: The eSpatial platform automatically optimizes routes based on parameters you define, freeing you from the burden of calculating drive times.
• Data uploading: With eSpatial, you can upload data about each point on your map. Or, if you use Salesforce, pull data straight from your CRM. This means that your sales or service reps can have detailed customer information for each stop, including customer names, addresses, phone numbers, key client contacts and more.
• Add multiple stops: Routes optimized in eSpatial can include up to 100 stops. You can easily add or remove stops when plans change.
• Scheduling: Program start and end times into each stop on your route to give drivers ideal benchmarks. (These can also be edited on the go.)
• CRM integration: You can map data straight from your CRM and use it to create your routes. This helps keep your data aligned across the business.
• Sharing features: Optimized route maps can be shared via publicly accessible links, in private groups or one-on-one, depending on your needs.

To get a full sense of what eSpatial can do for your organization, try the solution today by signing up for a seven-day free trial.

The post Route planning vs. route optimization appeared first on eSpatial.

Route optimization software should be a key weapon in the arsenal of any member of your organization who travels on a regular basis. But not all tools that bill themselves as route optimization solutions are created equal.

Failing to find the best routing software for your particular needs can seriously undermine the productivity of your team, which will negatively affect your organization’s bottom line. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the common shortcomings of ineffective mapping and routing apps and also emphasize the key features that must be a part of your team’s route optimization software platform.

Frequent pain points: What you don't want in a route optimization solution

Some of the problems we’re going to examine here are fairly obvious, while others might not come so readily to mind. However, all of them are capable of throwing a wrench into your planning, making things much more difficult for your on-the-road personnel. These issues include:

• Manual optimization is a no-go: When creating routes for teams of sales reps, service techs and other road personnel (i.e., a great number of people), it isn’t helpful to create and optimize routes manually. It takes too much time and doesn’t create truly optimized routes. In the end, there’s little benefit to this method.

• Consumer-grade apps are not enough: Consumer mapping apps, like Google Maps, are designed to get users from Point A to Point B. Field sales reps and service technicians need more from their routing tools than that basic functionality.

• Scheduling snafus: Field employees must always be mindful of their time so that every customer on their daily docket receives appropriate attention and service. But sometimes meetings or service calls can unexpectedly take more time — or less time – than what was allocated. If your route optimization solution isn’t built to let you adjust schedules and routes at a moment’s notice, it lacks a critical dimension.

• Unequal workloads: If one fleet driver or sales rep does significantly more driving than others on the team due to poor route optimization, they can burn out quickly and lose motivation. An insufficient mapping and routing application can exacerbate this problem.

• The need for the one right tool: When commercial drivers and salespeople need to use multiple apps to access the data they need, it takes time and effort away from their driving schedule and cuts down the time they can spend on appointments themselves.
• Impacts on customer service: If any aspect of the route optimization tool you use has even the slightest negative impact on customers’ perception of your organization’s services, that’s an unforced error that you can easily eliminate.

Key route optimization features and advantages

The ideal route optimization software solution will give its users the freedom to easily create routes that, simply put, make life easier for field personnel. Features that serve this purpose include:

To find out more about the difference route optimization can make, talk to a mapping expert about your software needs today!

The post Essential features to look for in route optimization software appeared first on eSpatial.

Neutralizing common pain points

Professional route optimization software is well-equipped to solve some of the most common issues that may arise for you and your team members. Take a look at just a few of the most frustrating issues:

Poor ratio of effort to reward

Sometimes team members fall into a rut. They start following the same route over and over, without much analysis – a pattern sometimes known as “the milk run.”

For a new employee, this can result from not knowing where else to go. They may not know who they should target for best results, or how to find more leads. In the case of a veteran team member, it can be a matter of habit. In any role, it’s easy to find a comfortable pattern that you keep repeating. But a sales rep who is seeing the same clients on the same schedule every month isn’t maximizing results.

Mapping software with advanced route optimization features can help. It puts all necessary information in front of new personnel, which alone can cut down on the complications of learning a new territory. While the new rep is learning the ropes, a manager can help prioritize targets. Whether that means meeting more often with high-value customers or targeting those within a certain industry as the ideal buyers of a new product, mapping software can better align team members with business goals.

For someone more experienced, a mapped-out territory can help them see things in a new light. Filtering by important factors, like potential sales, can reveal a disconnect between effort and results.



Time and scheduling pressure

One long meeting can throw off a whole day’s schedule, forcing a salesperson or technician to push or cancel other appointments. When the unexpected happens, being able to adjust routes in real time is a major advantage.



Less-than-spectacular customer satisfaction

When traveling sales reps need to make lots of stops in a day, it can be difficult to prepare for each meeting. One customer may need contract clarification, while another may be looking for a new product demo. But when sales reps show up under-prepared or foggy from the drive, it can impact their ability to perform.

A solution that can optimize driving routes to avoid inefficiency and display details from your company’s own CRM data can be a game changer here. Include any relevant information from your CRM, like name and purchase history. With these features, sales reps can reduce their driving time and use these valuable minutes to prepare.



Too much time spent on manual planning

Route optimization can be time-consuming and clunky when done by hand. Although it’s important for traveling sales reps and field personnel, it takes time away from meetings and other direct customer interactions. Intelligent route planning software can take the heavy lifting out of the equation. With automatically optimized routes, reps can spend more time on activity that actually drives revenue.

Lack of visibility for managers and support staff

When there’s a disconnect between field and office staff, your organization has a problem. To solve this, administrators, supervisors and support staff should have access to route plans.

eSpatial makes it simple to share information among team members. With that data in hand, managers can make more effective decisions about territory management. And if a particular customer needs immediate attention, office staff can quickly and easily contact the closest employee. This not only supports decision making and planning for office admins, but also improves efficiency for sales staff while facilitating better client service.

Imbalances in resource management

When workloads aren’t even, managers run into several problems. Some sales reps might not have enough opportunity to meet their quotas. This affects their earnings, can lead to pressure from managers and ultimately causes stress. On the other hand, too much work can cause burnout for any sales or service employee and lead to lost opportunity for the company.

Mapping data allows for the creation of more balanced territories, offering opportunity without overwhelming personnel. When paired with route optimization, it helps ensure team members are spending more time focused on customers and less on the road.



4 potential wins from route optimization

It’s important to note that eSpatial doesn’t just help you phase out your routing problems. The platform can also put your business on the road to successes it might not otherwise have been able to achieve:

Efficiency – without manual legwork

Route optimization for traveling team members is quick, streamlined and automatic in eSpatial. This means no one has to manually plot routes – or worse, rely on consumer-grade GPS tools for this purpose. Processes that go slowly in Google Maps require only a few minutes when using the eSpatial platform.

Kristen Eldridge, operations support analyst for Motiva and an eSpatial user, noted that the tool has saved her as much as 25 minutes per lead. Because she evaluates and plots routes for up to 30 leads a day, that’s no small number of opportunities to save.

“eSpatial saves me so much time,” Eldridge said. “I use it to investigate and target high potential leads, then plan routes for the salespeople on the ground. I used to do this with Google Maps, and it was tedious. With eSpatial, it takes only five minutes each.”



Fuel cost savings (and sustainability)

Intelligent route optimization can also reduce driving time and fuel costs. Considering how much your company spends for fuel and vehicle maintenance on-the-road personnel, you’ll realize that the savings quickly add up. Efficient driving routes can also help to lower your enterprise’s carbon footprint – an increasing concern for businesses.

Improved resource management and customer service

With more efficient driving routes for field personnel and visual data for team supervisors, resource planning and workforce management becomes an easier task. Sales reps receive equal workloads to prevent overloading or burnout.

“Since we can plan optimized routes for the salespeople on the ground, they can get more done and make more sales,” Eldridge said.

Users can also benefit from eSpatial’s filtering features to help prioritize accounts. Color coding helps managers and sales reps see which accounts along their route are the highest value, and which leads are the most recent. Prioritizing accordingly can help boost efficiency – not to mention sales.

Andres Delacruz, deputy director of business continuity for NorthStar and another eSpatial user, explained his use of the material: “We have a complete, up-to-date view of our clients, staff, and resources. This enables us to mobilize our staff and resources to the best location to support our clients and quickly react to incidents. eSpatial is an absolute game changer, helping us make better decisions.”

Agile planning, on the go

eSpatial enables users to plot multiple stops and include start and ending times for each meeting. Should a stop take more or less time than expected, team members can adjust the rest of the route to match. This helps put an end to scheduling problems and missed appointments, and can even enable staff to squeeze in an extra stop when they have the time.

To find out more about the difference route optimization can make, talk to a mapping expert about your mapping software needs today.

The post Why sales and service teams need route optimization appeared first on eSpatial.

Even after these transformations, your employees will still need to travel by car in various contexts. Field sales reps may take fewer trips, but they won’t phase out in-person routes entirely. Depending on your business, you may also have service technicians and couriers who have to  hit the road regularly. And when they do, they should use more than basic GPS mapping apps to make their routes as efficient as possible.

The cutting-edge eSpatial platform is your ideal solution. It gives team leaders all they need to create driving routes that reach as many customers as possible while cutting down on drive time and costs. Here, you’ll learn all you need to know about the fundamentals and key benefits of the route optimization process.

What is route optimization?

Route optimization involves planning the order and route of sales or service calls in the most efficient way possible. For this, you need a specialized route optimization tool. Most consumer apps let you input a starting location and a final destination, but adding more stops along the route is tedious and time-consuming. All-in-one mapping software from eSpatial lets users add all their stops at once, and it uses the geographic data to create an efficient route.

Sales reps don’t even have to worry about fiddling with the order of their stops. The route planner can automatically create the most efficient route between up to 100 stops from your organization’s database of customer locations. Ultimately, this leads to lower travel time and fuel costs.

There are other key reasons why route optimization is well worth your time and effort. For example: When you’re on the road, things don’t always go according to plan. Sudden traffic slows personnel down on long but unavoidable highways. Not every sales meeting, service call or appointment runs the same length of time. But with eSpatial, team members have an effective contingency plan.

If a meeting or appointment runs long, team members can use dynamic routing to easily adjust their paths and itineraries. And when cancelations happen, users can fill that appointment by searching their maps for other nearby customers.

Unlike many consumer-level navigation apps, you can share multiple routes created through a best-in-class route optimization solution. Users can send their route to team members, either publicly through a link or privately within a specific group.



What major benefits does route optimization offer?

There are a few more key differences between a route optimization solution like eSpatial’s mapping software and other, less effective map applications marketed to the average consumer. Take a closer look:

Automatic route planning

Intelligent route planning in eSpatial doesn’t just focus on the path’s beginning and end. The route is optimized across every stop along the way, whether you’re traveling one-way or roundtrip. This ensures that users save time and money while keeping to their schedule. It also eliminates the need for drivers to manually plot and plan routes. Last but not least, users can share routes with other team members via eSpatial to desktops or mobile devices, either publicly through a link or privately within a specific group.

Displaying destinations with CRM data

eSpatial mapping software works perfectly alongside your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. If you’re a Salesforce user, you can even use a direct integration that allows you to run eSpatial within your Salesforce instance. This helps unify customer data across your apps, so users always have access to accurate, up-to-date information regarding all of their appointments. When you look at each stop on the map, it will display any data you choose to enter, such as a customer’s name or their order history. Better prepared reps can better address the unique needs of each customer.



Plot out sales territories

It’s always critical to consider complementary features when looking for an ideal mapping and data visualization platform.

For example, in eSpatial you combine route optimization with all of the tool’s multi-faceted mapping power. This allows sales managers to create balanced geographic sales territories.

When you plan territories with geography in mind, it’s easier to create efficient sales routes later. Putting together manageable territories helps team leaders balance workloads for their personnel, and it also serves as an opportunity to improve the overall quality of customer service.



Visualize data to support decision-making

Visualizing sales and service data allows decision-makers to better understand the market, including the strength of their organization’s competition and the various opportunities for expansion that may exist. With territories mapped out, managers can easily see gaps or overlaps in coverage and modify routes and territory assignments accordingly. This can help your team minimize lost opportunities and eliminate costly inefficiencies.

The post What is route optimization? appeared first on eSpatial.

This is part two in a multi-article series exploring how you can help your sales team cope with an unpredictable pandemic recovery period. Read part one.

In the first entry of this blog series, we examined the major effects that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the sales environment during 2020. We concluded that while the crisis wasn’t devastating to sales across the board, it still led organizations to deal with considerable changes, including large-scale shifts to remote operations.

The evolutionary shifts in the sales process that were prompted by the pandemic will continue to have lasting effects, even as some outside sales reps return to the field. This hybrid model comes with both upsides and downsides. Consider these strategies and practices going to get the most out of your team going forward:

1. Reconsider segments and call frequencies

Most organizations assign sales teams based on certain criteria. For example, some reps may focus on small and medium businesses (SMB), while another team pursues multinational corporations. It may also be divided by industry or some other metric.

Each of your organization’s teams may need to reconsider how they approach their primary customer vertical. For example, SMB clients might need fewer face-to-face meetings because you’re having more regular video or email contact with them. This frees up time for reps to spend on other accounts.

Along similar lines, it’s no longer entirely necessary to think of sales reps using the inside/outside binary. After more than a year of experience working from home, many outside sales reps will be comfortable splitting their time between inside and field work, saving travel for the most valuable clients.

In a nutshell, as confusing as all these adjustments are at first, they can ultimately make your sales team much more versatile and effective.



Re-examining white spaces can reveal missed sales potential.

2. Finding new value in whitespaces

Since you’re rethinking many of your processes, it’s worthwhile to consider the value of your untapped and/or long-dormant “whitespace” sales territories. These are areas with low or non-existent customer and opportunity density.

Start by thinking about why certain areas became whitespaces in the first place. Why did, say, Pocatello, Idaho become a whitespace? TSL Marketing noted that when a metro area’s demand for your product or service tapers off and then ends, it often gets slotted into the whitespace category. If that’s what happened with Pocatello, it’s understandable.

However, many whitespaces are caused by territory circumstances, not actual demand. For example, let’s say you have a sales rep that’s covering a large city as well as a significant portion of the surrounding area. If the territory wasn’t properly balanced, that sales rep may have had enough opportunity in their immediate city that they never needed to visit the surrounding areas to hit quota. In that case, there may be lost opportunities in that whitespace because the rep has never needed to pay attention to them.

Doing some market research about the whitespace area or assigning an inside sales rep to try and generate appointments can help you determine whether you’re missing out on opportunities.

3. Consider territories by opportunity as well as workload

Your sales resources are finite. That’s why it’s critical to know the frequency, duration and travel time of outside sales trips – especially if you plan to have a hybrid team that sells on the road and remotely.

When dealing with a hybrid model, you have more flexibility to balance territories on opportunity, not just workload and geography. Making things more equitable helps give sales reps a better chance to succeed and also helps you more easily identify strong reps and those who need more coaching.

It may not be possible to segment territories by opportunity in every situation, but it’s always worth considering. (eSpatial will come in handy when looking to reorganize territories.)



Building territories from the bottom level first helps give you the flexibility needed to create equitable alignments.

4. Build territories from the ground up

The territories you create for your sales or service personnel will always make more sense if you start from the ground up. Begin by balancing your territory alignment at the smallest unit you plan to use, like ZIP codes. From there you can group lower territories into regions, areas and so on, depending on your sales organization’s structure.

Taking the opposite approach – i.e., building from the top down – can lead to issues as you get to the bottom level. Once you have limited the areas you can work in, it becomes more difficult to create equitable, balanced territories.

5. Focus on hard data when things are up in the air

A certain degree of speculation is unavoidable in sales. Reps often refer to it as “hunches.” There’s nothing wrong with acting on a hunch or making an educated guess, but it can be a problem in sales, especially during somewhat uncertain economic times like these.

According to Forbes senior contributor John Hall, certain sales data points can keep your planning reliably grounded even when other departmental metrics are fluctuating. These include the number of leads generated, lead-to-sale conversion rate, revenue percentages of new and existing customers, average sale amount, cost to close a sale and overall revenue growth.

eSpatial can be fundamental to your sales teams’ efforts to thrive in this new economic paradigm. Contact us today to learn more or start a 7-day free trial!

Want to learn more about how to manage your sales team's return to the field?

Register to watch the on-demand webinar

The post How your sales team can survive — and thrive — in these times appeared first on eSpatial.

Depending on your business, you may need to start delivering a product, providing a service or having a salesperson get in touch. In all these cases, you have to identify which of your customers are opening and when. We’re going to show you how a mapping software like eSpatial can help you create a targeted plan for your sales or service people to follow as new industries re-open.

The following video shows how you can quickly make an effective plan for your field salespeople. Using your customer data in eSpatial will allow you to plan better sales calls, and re-engage with your key customers sooner.

A short call with one of our mapping experts is the quickest way to find out more, and help you get started. Click Here to book a time that suits you.

The post How to Target Clients as Economies Re-open appeared first on eSpatial.

This is part of a multi-article series exploring how you can help your sales team cope with an unpredictable pandemic recovery period.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all areas of modern human life. All too often, its effects were nothing short of devastating, whether in terms of its death toll or the havoc it wreaked on the global economy. Companies of all kinds, across all industries, had to adapt to the new normal or get left behind by it — sales teams in particular.

Although signs of a more “normal” post-pandemic society are clear on the horizon in many parts of the world, there are still lessons to be learned from what the crisis did to so many different inside and outside sales teams. In this blog post, we’ll delve into some of the immediate consequences, look at early adjustments that organizations made and consider what these changes may mean for sales teams in the years to come.

Readjustment of hiring and expansion plans

By comparison to the doldrums that job-seekers went through during the Great Recession that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, the pandemic hasn’t caused long-term layoffs and hiring freezes — at least not across the board.

For example, job losses were massive in hospitality and leisure, according to Business Insider. But layoffs in the professional services sector (i.e. of sales reps and others) were not a large industry-wide drop-off. Losses varied wildly between organizations, some minimal, others significant. Companies that were already digitally transformed to function effectively with a remote workforce had a leg up on those not yet as advanced. In some cases, companies that maintained their sales teams allowed reps to handle new responsibilities outside of the deal-making realm.

Hiring initiatives may have been uneven — causing the job market to first favor job-seekers, then abruptly whiplash to employers and just as suddenly go back to candidates — but expansion plans in 2020 were almost all in stasis.



Change in new job listings on Linkedin throughout the pandemic.

Source: CNN Business

In retrospect, this was likely the best approach. If your organization weathered the storm of 2020 and came out in decent shape, delaying growth initiatives probably didn’t cause your window of opportunity to pass by.

Shifts in channel and buyer preferences

Among the organizations that were able to keep doing business in spite of all of the pandemic’s many pressures and limitations, revenue generation stayed on an even keel for the most part. The biggest shifts for sales teams were in the ways that sales were proposed, negotiated and agreed upon: B2B customers in particular were happy to shift away from in-person sales meetings and adopt video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype as their primary medium. A significant share of these buyers also used digital self-service tools, such as automated chatbots and other processes that didn’t require direct human interaction.

According to research from McKinsey and Company, it’s not only customers who’ve grown to appreciate this. More than 75% of buyers and sellers prefer remote human engagement or self-service to face-to-face conversation, primarily citing the ease and cost savings of not needing to travel.

In a vacuum, this isn’t necessarily a problem – but it’s not without side effects. As customers grow more accustomed to digital interactions, the quality of necessary calls (quarterly or bi-monthly check-ins with high-value customers, for example) may slowly deteriorate. In fact, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research surveyed 528 sellers in Q2 of 2020, and found that 88% of them had difficulty building relationships with buyers through virtual channels. Even if the relationships aren’t ultimately endangered, the difference in calls can make large-scale analysis more difficult due to skewed response curves.

The question of capacity

In the early days of the fully remote sales environment, you may have thought it meant reps automatically had a greater capacity: to take more calls, bring in more business.

But this isn’t always the case. Working from home can involve any number of sudden interruptions, especially for reps with children, so calls that would’ve needed 30 minutes or less in the office might be closer to 45 at home. Going forward, sales team leaders will have to look at reps’ remote capacity on a case-by-case basis rather than trying to get it down to a formula of some kind.

Some outside sales reps have struggled to adapt to their new digital reality and are itching to get back into the field. As they make that transition, either on a full-time or hybrid basis, new workload calculations will be required, particularly if some leads and customer still choose to deal with their rep through digital-first channels.

Looking to the future

It’s hard to say exactly how the ongoing evolution of the sales profession will progress. While many reps believe work-from-home frameworks have made things easier, others have struggled with the sudden change and isolation. Outside reps, who were used to building relationships face-to-face, are likely to begin limited travel in the near future, though concerns about returning to pre-pandemic spending (e.g., by expensing rental cars and lodging regularly again) may initially spook the C-suite.

Sales teams’ best bets will be to use a balanced approach that incorporates the best of traditional selling with the digitized methods that have become the norm in the post-pandemic world.

Want to learn more about how to manage your sales team's return to the field?

Register to watch the on-demand webinar

The post The pandemic was hard on sales teams — how do we move forward from here? appeared first on eSpatial.



The post 5 things every sales manager needs to do this year appeared first on eSpatial.

Data mapping is a critical way to visualize information. You can quickly and easily analyze your sales data in a geographic context, including sales territories, product distribution or delivery areas, and so on. The map brings a tangible dimension to analysis and strategizing efforts that might otherwise seem abstract, especially if you’re trying to make plans for the longer term.

It can be particularly useful to create a heat map to aid in these efforts. You can create this type of visualization in Microsoft Excel, but doing so comes with considerable limitations. Using the dynamic heat map feature in eSpatial will provide you with a much clearer picture of your data and help turn those numbers into plans of action.

What are heat maps and how can you use them to your advantage?

The simplest way to define a heat map is as a visualization of differences in density within a large geographical area. Density, in this case, refers to a quantitative data point you seek to examine – often, it means population.

A color scale assigned to the map, in that example, indicates greater or lesser population density, usually through darker and lighter colors. But for a sales team, metrics like the number of recurring customers or prospective customers would make more sense.

Heat maps generally fall into one of two categories:

• Hotspot heat maps point out areas of high or low density without using many fixed geographic boundaries – i.e., looking at the whole U.S. without focusing specifically on differences in density between states.
• Regional heat maps (or chloropleth maps) serve the same essential purpose but do focus on density disparities between defined regions. These could be council districts in a city, counties in a state, states or provinces in a nation and so on.

To glean the greatest possible insight from a map crafted using any heat map tool, you’ll need to analyze two or more data sets.

Knowing how many of your customers are purchasing on a frequently recurring basis as opposed to just a few times a year, for example, would be extremely helpful. Your heat map analysis in that case would involve annual sales figures and your primary customer database. You might ultimately find that frequent buyers are more common in certain areas than others, which will help you better allocate your team’s time and resources.

How to create a heat map in Excel



A heat map in Excel can work for basic jobs. Here’s how to put one together.

Create a heat map in eSpatial - step by step

Using eSpatial is not much more complicated than a tool like Excel or a free heat map generator. More importantly, it allows you to pinpoint density variances in an actual geographical context. This can help you conduct more thorough analysis.

Which heat map tool is better?

Truth be told, this will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish with your heat map. It’s more a case of “different” rather than “better” and ideally, you’ll use Excel and eSpatial together. (The latter is designed to import XLS data, after all.)

With that said, eSpatial allows for much more detailed analysis due to its use of individual points on the maps you create. Additionally, the flexibility to choose between a hotspot and geographical heat map, based on the metrics you choose to examine, is an invaluable asset. Visualizing your data with our cutting-edge platform offers immense strategic and bottom-line benefits.

Find out for yourself by signing up for a free seven-day trial!

The post Create a heat map in eSpatial vs Excel appeared first on eSpatial.

What you need instead is a comprehensive tool for sales territory mapping like eSpatial. In this post, we’ll cover the mapping functions – and limitations – in Microsoft Excel. We’ll also go over how you can better leverage your Excel data for geographic analysis by using eSpatial’s heat mapping features.

Can you create a map in Excel?

The best answer to this question is “yes and no.” What you end up making is a “map chart,” which is an insert in the middle of an Excel sheet adjacent to one of the tables on it.

The feature, found in the Insert menu of Excel, culls data from a selected cluster of cells. One of the columns must be geographical data points, like names of countries or cities. The other column will usually be metrics relevant to the locations listed, like population, tax revenue, gross domestic product, unemployment rate and so on. When you select Maps and then Filled Maps from the Insert menu of Excel, the data will illustrate as a small map. You can adjust formatting in some ways, including map projections, area, labeling and color-coding.



What are the major limitations of Excel map charts?

The first, most obvious limit of Excel’s mapping ability is that the feature simply isn’t available in more than a few early versions of Excel. It’s there if you have Office 365, but if your organization doesn’t use Office regularly (opting instead for Google Suite, as just one example), you might only have an older version of Office. The 2007 version is more common than you’d think in 2021, and it lacks the mapping function.

Even in the most up-to-date versions of Excel – the 365 module, or Excel 2019 (which is soon to be replaced by Excel 2022 later this year) – a number of significant shortcomings are still present. Perhaps above all, Excel can’t use datasets like street addresses and latitude/longitude coordinates to create map charts. It’s limited only to geographic locations, nationwide data points (like unemployment rate) and other high-level data.

Sales reps and their managers need to be able to use a much wider range of variables than that. By contrast, in a platform like eSpatial, two datasets are the bare minimum needed to create a map of territories or other areas. You’re not only able to use more data points for your sales maps when using eSpatial, you’re essentially encouraged to do so. Make them as detailed as necessary!

Creating superior heat maps using eSpatial instead of Excel

You can use eSpatial to generate a number of highly detailed maps to improve your territory management, route planning and campaign creation.

A heat map is one of the best examples of what you can do in eSpatial with your data sets. This may be a standard heat map, representing areas of density or surges in other values, or a regional heat map, which summarizes such data within a predefined area such as a country, state, county or ZIP code.



To make a heat map, follow these steps:

• Sign up for eSpatial (either the full service or as a trial) and log into your account.
• Upload your datasets from Excel and/or other tables you’re using.
• Click one of the sets as shown within the Control Panel, select Style & Color and choose the Heat Map option.
• Customize map features, including heat map range, transparency and radius distance.
• Use the Overlay Pins option if you want to see the original mapped data as pins atop the heat map.
• Save the map to finish.

For a regional heat map, the process is slightly different:

• Log in to your account and upload data.
• Under the Control Panel, once you select the data set, click Analyze (instead of Style).
• Select the Regional Heat Map option.
• You’ll then be asked to indicate your points dataset (the one you just uploaded) and the regional data for comparison. (A drop-down menu will show which regions are available for mapping; find the list of available regional data sets here.)
• After finding and selecting the right region, click Complete, and you’re all set!

To learn more about mapping in eSpatial, check out our blog or sign up for a trial!

The post How to avoid the limitations of creating maps in Excel appeared first on eSpatial.

Territory management is essential for all businesses that want to maximize the effectiveness of their sales teams. For large enterprises, this strategy can help drive sales higher. Enterprise territory management is an important tool for keeping big companies on track for growth. We’ll talk about enterprise sales, territory management and how to use specific techniques to empower growth.

What is an enterprise sales team?

An enterprise sales team is the sales department for a large corporation or company. They may work for an organization that has 5,000 or more employees. The sales team alone may consist of more than 100 people. Enterprise sales teams are home to a large number of sales professionals. According to a recent search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, about 460,000 people may work in sales functions at large US enterprises.

Sizable sales teams like these demand careful attention and coordination. Growing organizations will need to adjust their strategies as they expand. This sentiment is echoed by a representative from Alyce. In an interview with Built In, an Alyce sales leader said, “Don’t assume what has gotten you to the top of the hill is enough to get you to the top of the mountain.”

Even for long-standing enterprise sales teams that have a proven track record of success, periodic readjustments are necessary. The market will shift, and old strategies may become obsolete.

In particular, organizing territories requires skillful coordination to make sure the entire team is working together. Appropriately allocating workloads and resources will help ensure that sales remain in top shape.

What is enterprise territory management?

Enterprise territory management is the process of creating and maintaining sales territories for large businesses. It also refers to a specific feature from Salesforce. However, for our purposes, we are using the term to describe the process at large companies. Many different techniques and types of technology may be used.

For a small, local sales team, a simple territory management strategy might be sufficient. However, for enterprises, more complex, data-driven processes are required. This will help companies proactively support their sales representatives. At the same time, it will allow these staff members to have the resources they need to deliver results for the company. A comprehensive strategy will reduce the chances of individual sales personnel competing over the same leads while maintaining balance among workloads and opportunities. At the local level, making sure that associates can travel to all of their prospects and customers can help support the customer experience.

In order to successfully execute enterprise territory management, organizations must:

1. Create a territory model.
2. Assign accounts based on territories.
3. Focus on improving sales.

We’ll explore each one of these steps in-depth.

Creating a territory model

As we’ve outlined before, creating a sales territory plan is a four-step process.

The four steps are:

• Analyze your market: Assess where your current customers are located. Discover where you see new opportunities. Enterprises should study how regional competitors affect their strategy in overlapping areas.
• Segment your customers: Examine your customers to find how you can categorize them. Factors to consider include geography, industry and client expectations. Enterprises may have a lot of data from which to choose. Lean on the information that’s most helpful for your needs.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis: This acronym stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.” Identify how sales teams are performing. Enterprises should then map team analyses to customer segments and create territories.
• Create your sales territory plan: Once territories are in place, managers can communicate the blueprint to their teams. In large organizations, territory hierarchy information will be essential for ensuring alignment.

Enterprises may use multiple territory structures to achieve their desired results. Territory hierarchy strategies allow leaders at all levels to understand their responsibilities. For instance, an enterprise might have a vice president who is in charge of all sales for the Northeast. In this territory model, the Northeast would be a parent territory. Underneath parent territories, there is another territory type: the child territory. In our example, Massachusetts might be a child territory of the Northeast. Of course, this depends on the sales territory plan developed by the enterprise.



Hierarchies allow you to build territories that match your business structure.

Account assignment based on territories

An enterprise territory management strategy should be used to improve account assignment. Top-level executives who oversee multiple territories can use data to make important decisions about their territory model. By working with regional managers to discuss the unique features of each territory type, individuals can be assigned to accounts that suit their strengths. Periodically, enterprise sales leaders should seek to reassess each assigned territory. It is crucial to regularly verify that the business is operating with balanced territories.

Territory optimization may be required from time to time. Imbalances can result from market changes, growth or other factors. Even for the most experienced sales reps, being overworked will lead to a reduction in quality. In turn, this can affect sales and retention. Adjusting territories and ensuring that sales reps continue to have the resources they need — even as circumstances change — can add up to big wins across the enterprise.



Driving more sales with territory management

So what have we learned about the overall goal for enterprise territory management?

• Reps will thrive with fairer territories.
• Fairer territories will lead to more achievable quotes.
• More achievable quotes can foster a better customer experience.
• Together, that means higher sales and more robust customer support.

That sounds simple enough. But how do you turn higher sales into a reality for your enterprise?

Sales territory mapping software allows you to harness the power of data to inform your strategy. Even better, clear navigation and appealing visual representation make these strategies easy to communicate. From upper management to sales reps in the field, everybody will have a clear idea of what they need to do and how it adds up.

There are some additional strategies you can employ to increase outside sales with effective territory management. For instance, you can conduct collaborative, hypothetical analyses. Using territory mapping software, you can adjust territories on the fly to see how these changes would affect your bottom line. With better forecasting, you can make more informed decisions. That’s definitely more efficient than guesswork.

At the most granular level, sales reps can use the software to target high-priority leads with efficient route mapping.

Other methods for improving enterprise sales performance

In addition to enterprise territory management, large companies can take further actions to improve sales performance.

First of all, it’s important to develop the kind of sales team that’s right for your business. There’s no such thing as a universal sales rep. Different companies, and various industries, rely on their reps to have unique attributes. A 2017 report from McKinsey outlined some best practices for sales teams. These tips included hiring candidates who fit the ideal seller profile for the team. Training should also be tailored to developing those attributes. Where possible, team leaders should also seek to eliminate administrative burden for their staff members.

It may seem obvious, but automating these tasks, as well as enterprise territory management, could produce big benefits. Citing research from The Economist Intelligence Unit and CFO Research Services, a 2017 publication from Oracle pointed out that 40% of sales leaders “rely on instinct to make territory, quota, and incentive decisions.” That’s a missed opportunity. Are you in that bucket?

Find out how you can get a free seven-day trial of territory mapping and management software from eSpatial today.

The post How enterprise territory management delivers higher sales appeared first on eSpatial.