Author: Jason Orovio
How Nonprofits use RealZips to help people
We’re really excited to support some of the world’s best-known nonprofit organizations with our RealZips GeoData app for Salesforce!
Nonprofits are putting the RealZips app to use across four important areas:
1. Structure all data in Salesforce
2. Understand local demographics
3. Run campaigns for donations
4. Focus on communities in need
1. Structure all data in Salesforce
The RealZips app automatically enriches all records in Salesforce with geographic data. Nonprofits can structure millions of records by cities, counties, metropolitan areas, and their own regions.
As long as a record has a zip code, the RealZips app connects that record with powerful data about the zip code. All your data in Salesforce becomes geographically structured!
It’s absolutely amazing to see how more and more nonprofit teams become empowered to automatically divide all their donors by counties, and invite the them to local events!
The screenshot below shows a potential donor in zip code 10016. When the lead comes in through a web form, the geographic data points are automatically added. The lead is automatically assigned to the right contact person in the “New York Greater” office:
2. Understand local demographics
The RealZips app contains deep demographic data for every zip code across the United States. Nonprofits can use this rich data to better understand where they should ask for donations, and of course where there is a need for their volunteer work:
3. Run campaigns for donations
It takes seconds to find where in a city a nonprofit should focusing on getting donations; by running an instant report over zip codes with a high average income:
The nonprofit team can very quickly run campaigns in the areas where they can expect donations from, selecting potential donors that live in these zip codes:
4. Focus on communities in need
When the nonprofit has built up a base of donations and volunteers, they use RealZips to pinpoint where in their city there is a great need for their help.
The team can run instant reports, pinpointing areas with many kids in low income areas. They select zip codes and track their progress in these zip codes over time, such as number of volunteer hours going into each area:
We couldn’t be more excited, seeing our RealZips app being used to provide help for people in need!
Why did I build RealZips for Salesforce?
We are Salesforce Guys, just like you
Every day, I struggled with ownership issues in Salesforce
As sales reps joined or left our team — I was always behind — trying to figure out who should own leads, accounts, and contacts.
When territory borders changed, the problem became much worse. It took months to transfer ownership of thousands of records, not to mention editing lead assignment rules and adjusting account sharing rules.
Other Salesforce Admins kept asking: “Isn’t there a better way?”
Since so many of us live with the same challenges, it made sense trying to solve the territory management problems once and for all.
I spent over two years building the RealZips app, with the intent to fix all our territory headaches. It was a painstaking experience, but my fellow Admins kept pushing me forward.
When Salesforce Admins set up RealZips, this is what will happen
- The native app adds zip codes and market potential to Salesforce
- Each zip code has 50 geographic data points, including sales territories
- All existing records are automatically linked to their zip code
- CRM data is structured by territories, counties, time zones & more
- Setting up lead assignment becomes a matter of minutes, not weeks
- Reassigning ownership can take 30 minutes, as opposed to a month
Empower your sales team with “3x Right”
Salesforce Admins love to show me how they now focus efforts on enabling their sales teams to win more opportunities, guiding sales to:
- Focus on the right place
- Meet with the right customer
- Pick the right time
Life Sciences companies helping Doctors
Need for Actionable Sales Data
Pharmaceutical and medical device companies market and sell in highly complex environments, while helping doctors treat more patients.
To stay competitive, these companies must have actionable data in their CRM systems to unlock strategic decisions, manage focused marketing campaigns, and run efficient sales activities.
The ultimate goal for Life Sciences is to better serve doctors and care providers, so they in turn can help more patients with better treatment methods.
Disconnected CRM data
Unfortunately, we are learning that most Life Science companies still have disconnected data repositories across:
- Demographics and patient data
- Medical market studies
- Potential customers: doctors, offices and hospitals
- Existing customers and their interactions
- Sales data; both their own and their competitors’
- Medical procedures databases
All doctors in the United States have a federal NPI number (National Provider Identifier or NPI is a unique 10-digit identification number issued to health care providers in the United States by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The first step to better CRM data is to integrate NPI numbers.
“Disconnected data limits a company’s ability to understand their market opportunity and slows down marketing and sales efforts, which allows the competition to jump in.”
For example, we have all seen companies spend millions in marketing and sales efforts in geographical areas that have limited growth opportunities. Meanwhile, they are leaving other areas of the country wide open to their competition’s hyper-growth.
Five steps to revenue growth for Life Sciences
More and more Life Science companies are taking full advantage of our RealZips GeoData Platform for Salesforce. They are implementing these five simple steps to protect and grow market share:
1. Connect all data
By using the RealZips in Salesforce, these companies are now connecting endless amounts data geographically, starting on the Zip code level.
As different data streams are automatically connected within the RealZips geographic structure, the combined real-time data becomes highly actionable GeoData.
GeoData can range from demographics, leads and existing customers divided by hospitals, to care provider specialties, medical procedures, the company’s own sales data and competitive sales volume analytics:
2. Structure GeoData for instant decisions
When all GeoData becomes available in real-time, analyzing the data and create automated indexes that will guide all marketing and sales initiatives.
For example, it’s very easy to index GeoData based on market potential and your company’s performance. Every geographic area will automatically be indexed, so everyone in your company can act within the GeoData matrix (shown below).
- If an area of a city has high potential and no performance, the growth opportunity is substantial
(Represented by the tile “1. GO!” below) - Reversibly, if an area has low potential but relatively high revenue performance, it’s mostly tapped out
(Shown in the tile “4. MAINTAIN” below)
3. Transform GeoData into action
All this powerful GeoData is 100% available in Salesforce.com and integrated with all existing customer data. It now becomes possible for your whole company to immediately act on this continuously updated GeoData!
Your team will be able to:
- Focus sales in areas in sales territories with the highest potential
- Run marketing campaigns in the top 100 markets across the country
- Pick the best locations to host customer events
- Spend the right amount of effort in each zip code, based on opportunity
- Point out demographic markets for doctors, to help them succeed in their patient onboarding and treatment
Continuously updated RealZips Dashboard, combining demographics, count of Doctors, sales activities and sales progress:
4. Turn action into Doctor’s interest
When your team is empowered with actionable data, every discussion with care providers (such as doctors and nurses) take on a whole new meaning. Your team will have data about the care providers’ local market, including deep demographic insights such as age, income, lifestyle preferences, insurance data and much more.
Your team will be able to help position your product and services in the context of each local patient market; helping Doctors pinpoint their own market opportunity.
With GeoData at their fingertips, your marketing and sales teams can select which local markets to engage in. They can focus on enabling care providers in markets with the highest patient reach, while providing a best-fit for your offering:
5. Convert Doctor’s interest into revenue
As our customers embrace the RealZips GeoData and these workflows, they often experience revenue growth within five weeks. The relationship between the sales team and care providers turn into a partnership, enabling the care providers to even better treat patients.
Typical feedback from Life Science users of RealZips:
- “Our marketing and sales teams can focus on the top 15% zip codes with the highest growth potential in each sales territory.”
- “As we meet more doctors in the field, we engage with at least 15 % more care givers.”
- “Discussions with doctors are no longer focused on products. Instead we share local demographics and how our product and service will help the doctors serve more patients.”
Help care providers serve patients
We are amazed to see the success our Life Sciences customers create for their companies, care providers and patients.
Ramp up Sales with Drive Time in Salesforce
Help Your Field Sales Team Spend Their Time More Productively
How should selling time be divided between existing customers and new leads? If too little time is spent with existing customers, long-term contracts will be lost. If not enough time is invested in building relations with new leads, not enough new business will be generated.
Catch-22 Paradox
Balancing selling time is a classic Catch-22 paradox; If you take great care of existing customers, it’s hard to find time with new leads. If you only chase new deals, you will lose existing customers.
Balance Sales Time
One method to combat this is simply putting in extra hours — doing more of both farming and hunting — however this is not sustainable. Instead, learn from successful sales professionals who are very effective in how they geographically manage their sales territories.
Avoid the Wild Goose Chase
Over the years, we’ve witnessed how certain sales people focused on a fairly small area of their existing sales territory. They build up relationships with potential customers in their own backyard. On the flip side, we have seen sales reps covering large territories, driving great distances in the process. Can you guess which type of sales professional is capable of building the most sustainable business for themselves?
Lead in Salesforce.com complete with the closest sales rep and service rep, plus approximate Drive Time in minutes:
The Marketing Campaign That Fizzled
We have all seen it before: The marketing team runs a great campaign and creates warm leads for the sales team. The sales team is excited and starts visiting the new leads. But after a few weeks, few of the once-warm leads are getting closer to a close.
Marketing Sending Sales out on Field Trips
Let’s say a marketing campaign generated 20 leads across a sales territory. The sales rep is excited and starts calling the leads and books 5 visits. The first visit turns out to be a 45 minutes drive and the second is a 2.5 hour field trip. The second lead just made our sales person spend almost a whole day of valuable selling time driving instead. From that point, the interest in pursuing more leads usually diminishes significantly.
Run Successful Marketing Campaigns Based on Drive Time
Fortunately, it’s now possible for marketing and sales to coordinate campaigns and lead follow-up in a much better way. By automatically adding the Drive Time between each sales representative and their respective leads in Salesforce, the Marketing team can drastically improve their targeted marketing campaigns.
Salesforce Report with 15,312 Leads Divided by Drive Time Zones
The report below is from Salesforce.com. All leads are automatically put into “Drive Time Zones”. The marketing team intensifies their campaigns in the areas closest to each sales person:
The Benefits of Drive Time Zones in Salesforce.Com Are Compelling:
Marketing can deliver highly targeted leads to the sales team.
Sales can reach more leads and build relations faster.
Customers are better serviced by having their sales rep close by.
Save the Sales Team Thousands of Hours in Drive Time
The people behind the Salesforce app RealZips.com spent years making Drive Time in Salesforce.com possible. Fortunately, your whole team can now take advantage of this new technology within days.
Why zip codes in Salesforce.com?
After developing and managing CRM systems for 25 years, it became clear to us that organizations are missing out on large revenue opportunities.
We had discussions with well over a thousand people in management, marketing and sales and the outcome was always the same:
- Our CRM database is growing rapidly, making it hard to find information.
- Sales can’t manage customers across cities, counties or metropolitan areas.
- We don’t know revenue potential across geographic areas.
Every discussion leads to more unanswered questions:
- How do we know we’re adding sales reps in areas with enough potential?
- Are we spending marketing dollars in areas where we can generate leads?
- Does the economic outlook for an area impact our chances to win deals?
- How much more growth can we capture in local markets?
These unanswered questions cost any company millions of dollars in lost revenue. When marketing and sales spend time and effort in geographical areas with slim growth potential, they are leaving greater opportunities in other locations open for their competition.
Most organizations do not have the right data to find the best areas for revenue growth.
Pinpoint market potential with zip codes
Zip code data have been proven to drive sales success. There’s a tremendous amount of geographic data related to zip codes, that must be used to understand the market potential and track sales performance.
Zip code-based market potential, for example, is the number of companies your team targets, and the number of decision makers to be contacted. Market potential can be demographics data based on age, income, and spending preferences. There are thousands of zip code-based datasets, describing your company’s potential.
Most companies sit on a gold mine of their own market and sales data! But the highly detailed data is unfortunately locked away in invoicing systems and databases that cannot be easily be accessed by marketing and sales teams.
What happens when existing CRM data is structured by zip code?
What if we would put all zip codes into your Salesforce CRM system? Next, we could automatically structure all existing CRM data by Zip code; so all data is highly organized and useful. Every zip code would have the associated city name, county, metropolitan area, number of businesses your team is targeting and many more data points that help describe your true market potential.
Your CRM database will be much more useful when your team can search and report all data by zip code, city, county, sales territory, metropolitan area, sales region, state, census region and much more.
Combine external market potential with your CRM data
When external geographical data – number of decision makers and companies your team should target – is added to each Zip code, many of the original questions are immediately answered. It’s now possible to pinpoint a geographic area’s potential and compare with the number of existing customers.
Salesforce report: Compare the number of potential customers – “Software Publishers” – with existing Leads and Accounts. Review activity level and won opportunities.
The difference between an area’s potential number of customers and the number of existing customers is a true eye-opener. Having instant access to this data changes how companies focus their marketing and sales resources. The data is often used to optimize sales territories and empower the sales team to focus efforts in the right areas and beat sales quotas.
Adding zip code-based sales data to your CRM data
Next type of geographic data to add is your internal data for sold products and services on an aggregated zip code level. The data can be from your own sales, channel sales or from partners.
Drive success by aggregating data by zip code in real-time
It’s a huge upside to automatically combine existing CRM data and zip code based business data.
When adding external data over sales potential with internal sales data, your organization is creating a true competitive advantage.
Zip code-based GeoData is proven to connect you faster with the right customers in the right geographic areas.
Get zip codes and GeoData in Salesforce now; you can’t afford to wait.
Empower Sales with Business Density
How can a sales team plan where to look for growing their business?
Throughout my 20+ years in business development, I’ve been part of mapping out where to find new sales opportunities. It was either my own territory, my team’s territories or a whole company’s regions and territories. The questions are always very similar:
- Where do we have customers today?
- Where can we find new customers?
- How can we find clusters of new customers?
- How do we measure our success?
Business Density Key Metrics
One of the absolutely quickest ways to understand where to look for new customers is the key metric Business Density by zip code, categorized as follows:
- High – 200 or more businesses per square mile
- Medium – Between 30 and 200 businesses per sq. mile
- Low – Less than 30 businesses per sq. mile
This business density metric creates “islands” on a map used to identify general areas where a company should focus their marketing and sales activities. No matter which industry your company specializes in, it provides a powerful guidance for where field teams should engage. Simply start in high density areas and work outwards (see image below).
We have compiled high quality Business Density maps for 30 major markets across the United States.
Empowering sales with RealZips Key Metrics
These key metrics originate from our RealZips app for Salesforce. The RealZips app has many out-of-the-box metrics, which can be combined with your own customer data and sales data. You can add customized data over business density for your industry focus.
Overview of Zip codes and Key Metrics
These key metrics will empower Salesforce.com user in your company, providing guidance to areas where your team can close more deals.
Key Metrics for Zip code 10019 in New York City
Manage Territories in Salesforce.com with RealZips GeoData
Salesforce recently upgraded the native territory management module to Territory Management 2.0.
Territory Management 2.0 lets you build sales hierarchies and assign access to Accounts across your whole sales team. Over the years, we have learned that access to Accounts must be set up right to drive collaboration across sales teams and ultimately sales success.
However, matching customer Accounts to territories is always a challenge:
- How do you assign all Accounts in “New England” to the New England Director of Sales?
- How can Accounts in Greater San Diego and surrounding cities (La Jolla, Coronado, Mission Valley, etc.) automatically be assigned to the “San Diego Territory”?
- How do you assign all Accounts across New York Metropolitan area to an Key Account Manager for “NY Metro”?
By combining the RealZips with Territory Management 2.0 you can solve these challenges listed above. Everyone in your company will be able to check if all Accounts are assigned to the right salesperson. Learn how to use RealZips in Salesforce Territory Management, by reviewing this help post.