Four videos in and we’ve built up a pretty complete picture of a territory. We know which accounts haven’t been visited in too long, we know what they’re worth and whether they’re growing or declining, and we’ve got a map full of prospects we didn’t even know existed until the data layer showed them to us. The question at this point is obvious: what do you actually do with all of that? The answer is you build the day around it, and that’s what this final video is about.
The route we built mixes three kinds of stops: accounts from the activity layer that haven’t had a visit in too long, accounts from the year over year layer that used to be strong and are going in the wrong direction including Saddle Brook Truck Sales which is declining and needs a real conversation, and a few prospects from the data layer including Quantum Moving and Storage, because they’re on the way and a face to face introduction with a new prospect is worth a thousand cold emails. Maps optimized the sequence so we’re not crisscrossing the territory burning miles, and the whole thing took about two minutes to put together.
Then the phone comes out, and this is where it lives for the rest of the day. The route loads on mobile with the same stops in the same order, drive times calculated, and the first stop is already queued up. When you arrive you check in, log a note about the visit, create a follow-up task if you need one, and the CRM is updated before you pull out of the parking lot. No sticky notes, no catching up on data entry at ten o’clock at night. Just done, and on to the next stop.
One thing that comes up every time we show this is whether a rep has to rebuild the route from scratch every single week, and the answer is no. For a lot of our clients we build what I call a territory rhythm, where Monday is the metro accounts, Wednesday is the north county run, and Friday is whatever makes sense for that rep’s geography. We build those layers into folders, share them with the rep, and from that point forward Monday morning looks like this: open your Monday folder, your layers are already there, hit optimize, and go. The setup work happens once. The rep just shows up and drives.
Salesforce has spent the last two years telling everyone that AI is going to transform field sales. Maybe it will someday. But right now, today, there is a tool in their catalog that can show you who to call on, in what order, with drive times calculated and the CRM updating itself in the field, and they’ve essentially stopped talking about it. We haven’t, because we’ve seen what it does for the companies that actually use it, and it’s not incremental. It’s the kind of thing that changes how a sales team operates.
Maps is more sophisticated than most people realize, and getting it implemented is less complicated and less expensive than you’d think. Our Salesforce Maps Jumpstart gets you fully configured and running for less than six thousand dollars, and Black Iron handles the heavy lifting so your team can just show up and use it. Details here: