The Power of WHERE:
Why does location matter?
I know we don’t sell the technology right…we sell the solution and today we want to do exactly that. Well not sell. Perhaps explain a little more about the power of WHERE and why location can help you understand your data. Yeah…that’s more like it.
We think it starts by understanding what geospatial location intelligence is and how it can be used effectively to understand data.
So, First let’s look at what Mapsimise is, and what you can do with it. You might be thinking it’s about maps, therefore it is about logistics, travel, and direction. In this case we are sorry to say that is not the case.
Mapsimise is a data platform. Maybe we should have called it Data-Mise but that would probably make even less sense. Sure, we have a map but that is just the blank canvas we use. The data we add to that canvas helps you visualise or paint the picture of what is happening where in your business.
WHAT, WHEN and WHERE
We all know the three critical words in business, which at WHAT, WHEN and WHERE. As a business owner you need to know WHAT is happening. This usually is broken down by what the activity is. Sales, Marketing, Service, or direct CUSTOM, there are many other options but the WHAT is very important. This is usually recorded in a CRM or a spreadsheet.
The WHAT also might relate to assets, customers, vendors, suppliers, or even shops or warehouses. When it comes to the WHEN and understanding WHAT happened when this is usually the timeline of activity, i.e. what did we do this week, last week what is the plan for next week. Now on to WHERE. If you take the WHAT and the WHEN and add WHERE you now get a holistic view of activity in your business and where it is happening.
Every business including yours has data around the activity that you undertake. This might be the collection of customers information, address and telephone. Then activity like sales, marketing campaigns and support requests. You may even want to map revenue by region or by salesperson or even what products have sold over a period of time by location.
Customer Relationship Management
It is likely that you will have a CRM system or type of Customer relationship management tool or a database. These are to collect all the data you work with. Or maybe you are using a spreadsheet, a lot of systems we know give a list view one record after another just like a spreadsheet.
Most systems do not build any type of relationships with data by location. So from a list of customers you cannot easily see where customers are located – unless you have memorised the latitude and longitude of every single postcode or zip code, which is probably unlikely, even we are not that good.
By building a map view of your data be it customers, sales or service, we can help you identify patterns by location. You start to see clusters of activity, you could even trend activity over the different weeks or month.
So how does location analytics help you?
What location analytics gives you in return is analysis of what is happening and where. it helps you build a picture and identify relationships between customers and prospects by location. It will help you identify market share of business activity in each sales territory and location.
And what is more is will help you identify areas where you have NO customers or little activity.
The reality of understanding the WHERE means you can plan your marketing activity. You could plan a road show of smaller events and go where the prospects are. You can manage visually the activity and value of a sales region and more so build marketing lists by region or by a given location.
Ok, what else. Well that Is probably it for now. However, the difference with what we do with mapsimise.com is that we help your team use data from existing system to understand it spatially gaining real location insight.