Author: Fred Widarsson

After 25 years of developing and running CRM systems, every organization we meet has the same question:

The sales and marketing teams can’t find their own data. How do we fix it?
If your team can’t search customers and analyze data, many things happen:

• Duplicate records are added, making it even harder to find data.
• Sales can’t find customers in the CRM system while traveling in the field.
• Marketing can’t effectively target cities, counties or metropolitan areas.
• The team’s trust in your organization’s data goes down.
• Overall usefulness of your CRM data is questioned.

We have witnessed numerous times how this scenario plays out. We kept thinking there must be a better way. What if we added Geographic Data to your CRM data?

What is GeoData?

Geographic Data (GeoData) is geographic data points of many types that enrich your customer data. Samples of GeoData are zip code validation, city and county names, metropolitan areas and time zones. GeoData also adds demographics, federal regions, your organization’s complete sales territory information and more.

Why everyone needs GeoData

Search for “Fort Lauderdale” in your CRM system. Then, try to find all customers in that city by searching for “Ft Lauderdale.” Most likely you won’t find many until you also search for misspellings such as “Ft. Lauderdale” and “Fort Laderdale.”

Next, you want to reach out to customers in towns near Ft. Lauderdale. Include the neighboring town “Hollywood” in your search. Now, your result will likely include customers in many other states:

How GeoData empowers your team

With all your CRM data enriched with GeoData, a search for “Fort Lauderdale” would uncover all the right customers immediately. If you need to include surrounding cities, simply search for the county “Broward FL.”

Within seconds, you can view customers in the cities near Fort Lauderdale:

How GeoData drives sales success

The reasons to enrich CRM Data with GeoData are compelling:

• Adding GeoData is a very quick process, providing a fast ROI.
• Your CRM data will have a robust and useful geographic structure.
• Searches, reporting and analysis will be very powerful for everyone.

Your entire organization will be able to do new things:

• Search customer data across zip codes, cities, counties, metropolitan areas, sales territories, sales regions, time zones and federal regions.
• Match up areas with great business potential against your lead data.
• Your team will gain trust in their CRM data.

GeoData is intended to drive success by identifying and targeting the right customers, which will enable your team to close more deals.

Sample Salesforce Lead record enriched with GeoData

Salesforce records can be enriched with any type of GeoData. In the sample below, a Lead has been enriched with city, county, time zone, owner matching and more:

Having worked with CRM systems for 25 years, the challenge was always the same:

“We must align ownership of customer data, to match up with sales territories”

Aligning ownership is a moving target that’s impossible to keep up with. Sales territory borders change, salespeople get new jobs, not to mention customers moving to new cities.

The effort involved in trying to keep ownership aligned is overwhelming and costly. If your organization does in fact have customer records owned by the wrong salesperson, most of us know what happens:

• Commissions are paid to the wrong sales people.
• Sales people do not meet their quotas.
• Customers are not being called on properly.
• Sales people can’t get a true overview of their own customers.
• Mailers are sent out, with the wrong sales peoples’ names listed.

Seeing all this happen in front of our eyes, we knew there had to be a better way.
Imagine being able to see if a record has the wrong owner:

We understood that having capability to align ownership across data in Salesforce.com would have a fundamental impact for most organizations:

• The sales team can immediately spot and correct mistakes.
• The Salesforce Admin is empowered to transfer thousands of records in minutes.
• Your whole team’s trust in your company’s data would improve.
• Your company would be able to connect faster and deeper with customers

Helping teams solve these challenges

After living with these pain-points ourselves for many years, It is now truly exciting to solve these challenges and empower our customers’ entire organizations with our app.

The best part is when our customers call us and letting us know they’re saving 100+ hours  in less than 60 minutes. We never get tired of listening to our customers, as they’re telling us how much they love to be able to align ownership across their CRM data.