Can Missing Geodata in Salesforce Limit Your Teams’ Success?

The Salesforce CRM platform is fantastic, empowering your team to connect faster with customers, partners, and potential clients. Salesforce is the number one software for customer success, helping organizations like yours manage customer activities and stay in constant touch with all your stakeholders.

However, there is a challenge when it comes to your own data in Salesforce. The data that your team manages is not structured into critical geographic structures such as cities, counties, metropolitan areas, sales territories, or partner regions.

Global Territory Management Powered by Zip Codes
Customer records that don’t have geographic data will “float around” in your Salesforce CRM, creating all kinds of challenges for your team. Without an automatic geographic data structure, it becomes hard to assign ownership to customers, manage marketing and sales activities, and understand where your team will find your future customers.

“The more we can organize, find, and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.”

 —Vint Cerf

RealZips provides a robust solution for these issues with the RealTerritories add-on. RealTerritories delivers a powerful territory management system, based on the robust geographic data structures within the RealZips GeoData platform.

RealTerritories offers an easily accessible and customizable framework, making it possible to manage territories and sales team hierarchies. Businesses can now enable collaboration within their own teams and will channel partners with the intent to drive revenue acceleration.

You can help your teams drive success by automatically matching customers and sales teams in any geographic area. In short, you will enable your organization to get in touch with the right customers at the right time.

Key Features of RealTerritories
RealZips is used to generate revenue by providing sales reps, management, operations teams, and executives with powerful tools that will drive sales success. Common use cases for RealZips span across:

  1. Territory planning
  2. Territory optimization
  3. Territory management
  4. Addressable market data
  5. Sales & activity quotas
  6. Cross-team collaboration
  7. New reps ramp-up
  8. Territory analytics & change history
  9. Lead & customer assignment

By dividing your customers by territories, you can assign ownership to the right sales rep in a matter of hours. You can empower your sales field teams by potentially saving them 15 or more hours of drive time per month. When sales reps can effectively target zip codes with the highest number of potential clients, your team will simply be spending more time with ‘best-fit’ prospects.

Businesses may free up 15% of the total workload across the marketing operations team, thanks to RealZips. Marketing campaigns can be highly targeted by automatically segmenting geographic areas by market potential.

RealZips makes it possible to manage global territories by providing a powerful geographic data structure across all countries in the world. Needless to say, there are millions of postal codes across all countries—so the RealZips app can dynamically use both partial and full postal codes—which makes highly complex global territories simple to manage.

Other proven use cases for RealZips span across routing 100,000 or more leads to franchise locations, adding 550,000 plus medical procedures for territory optimization, automatic division of contact by time zone, increased lead generation, and smaller sales teams to incur yearly revenue for the staff and your business.

Conclusion
While Salesforce offers you an amazing platform for all your CRM data, there are always ways to help your business improve your organization’s customer service levels and team’s performance. The RealZips app, combined with the RealTerritories add-on, makes it possible to optimize territory planning, set your sales and field teams up for success in lead generation, allows for highly targeted marketing, and helps to uncover what drives business success.

RealZips is built to help you and your team get the most out of your Salesforce CRM system, enabling your team to focus on helping your customers succeed.

7 Steps to Accelerating Revenue with RealZips

Organizations using the Salesforce platform are implementing the RealZips app, empowering their whole team.

Users of RealZips are continuously sharing how they are now closing more deals with our app.

This post shows you the 7 steps successful teams take, as they accelerate their revenue with the app and our market data.

What is the RealZips app?

RealZips adds a geographic structure and market data to all CRM data in Salesforce. Your team will have powerful territory management, thanks to our extensive geographic database based on zip codes. The app and it’s data are 100% native, ensuring no security risks and instant user acceptance.

How will we benefit from RealZips?

The app automatically structures existing CRM data by zip codes, cities, metropolitan areas, counties, sales regions, sales territories and more. The benefits are immediate since your team can search and report customer data in new ways – focusing activities in geographical areas that will generate most sales.

How does the RealZips app work?

RealZips is the world’s only GeoData Platform. This is the quick-take:

  • 40,000 zip codes are added to your Salesforce in 15 minutes.
  • Zip codes have 50 data points, for geographic structure and market data.
  • Existing CRM data records are automatically linked to a zip code.
  • Sales territories are based on zip codes, linking all CRM data to sales territories.

What are the steps to get started?

RealZips enables organizations like yours to identify growth opportunities and drive sales results. These are the seven steps organizations take while rolling out the RealZips app:

1. Identify Addressable Market

The RealZips app has very deep market data by zip code, enabling your team to pinpoint the total addressable market. The app describes for example corporate targets across 1,000 industries and ranges of employees, including headquarter locations. The demographics data is incredibly deep, ranging across income, age, and lifestyles.

In RealZips, it’s now possible for organizations to distinguish their total addressable market by their primary market and secondary market.

For example, the primary market for your team might be neurosurgeons, while the secondary market would be patients served by these doctors.

Secondary market data is one of the most powerful ways for sales teams to drive trust in discussions with their prospects.

For example, a rep can showcase the RealZips demographics data for the area surrounding the customer’s office.

2. Set Geographic Structure

The RealZips app structures CRM data dynamically across all geographical level. Your team can instantly use e.g. metropolitan areas and counties, to drive successful marketing and sales activities. New geographic levels can be added on the fly, to include areas for specific marketing campaigns!

With a geographic structure in place, existing CRM data is dramatically enhanced and becomes actionable for both marketing and sales teams. With drive time data in RealZips, a lead can be automatically assigned to the closest sales representative or location. Also, drive time data can be used for marketing campaigns based on all customers’ proximity to your sales representatives or locations.

3. Index Market Potential

Many companies miss out on tremendous growth opportunity – simply by not relating each geographic area, to the local market potential – right in Salesforce.

Without market potential in Salesforce, there is no method to track revenue growth against the total addressable market, optimize territories based and prospects, and empower the sales team across territories.

Marketing teams running campaigns without geographic market potential will not be able to target the best-fit areas, missing out on lead generation and revenue growth.

The RealZips app creates automatic indexes for each zip code. Your team will be able to act on each area’s’ market potential and real-time revenue data.

4. Implement Territory Management

The Territory Management module in RealZips effectively combines each territory’s zip codes, market potential and existing leads, accounts and contacts.

Key metrics for each territory roll up from zip codes, giving the sales team a real-time view over where to find and close deals.

A RealZips Territory can quickly be divided into zones based on drive time for the sales representative.

Sales hotspots can be created on the fly within territories, to manage revenue growth in areas with highest market potential.

As territories are changed – customers can quickly and accurately be reassigned to a new territory – complete with a track record of changes.

5. Focus Marketing Activities

It’s a marketers dream to have all leads and customers organized by MSA Metropolitans, cities, CBSAs, counties, sales territories, and regions. The marketing team can run campaigns in zip codes that can be targeted with Google AdWords campaigns, within a 20-minute drive time of the closest representative or location!

Campaigns can be geared towards areas with the high market potential and no current customers. Events can be launched in the exact areas where most leads and customers can quickly travel to.

6. Empower Sales Teams

Most sales teams struggle to build a pipeline of new customers, and closing deals. The RealZips app is simply designed to empower salespeople to be at the right place, taking to the right customers, at the right time.

RealZips cuts down on the search for new customers, allowing the whole organization to focus on areas with most prospects, as close to as possible to your company’s locations.

7. Accelerate Revenue Growth

RealZips can often be implemented in a matter of days. Our customers love to report back on their sales success. We are seeing motivated organizations drive results within weeks, generating net new revenue streams.

Our app is built on 25+ years of CRM experience within companies producing hyper growth. You can now apply our experience of accelerating sales, by rolling out RealZips and market data to your team.

Accelerate Revenue with RealZips for Salesforce

More and more organizations implement RealZips for Salesforce. We’re excited to now share how high-growth companies use our app to propel their success!

The RealZips app provides territory management and a geographic structure for CRM data in Salesforce. Your CRM data is automatically enhanced with geographic data, such as market data, sales territories and sales regions.

RealZips for Salesforce makes it possible to identify market potential and compare against sales performance. Sales teams using the app can focus their efforts in areas with the highest growth opportunity.

These are the six steps to manage growth with RealZips:

 

1. Industry

Select best-fit industries
The product or service you sell must solve specific challenges for the targeted industry, and be supported by customer success stories. A targeted industry should have enough potential companies of the right size and profile, to be worth pursuing.

Challenges
If your team needs to change the sales pitch for different prospects, it’s takes time to build a high-value pipeline of opportunities. The key is a best-fit industry focus, making the sales pitch consistent. However, switching to a narrow industry focus makes most sales teams uncomfortable, as we all fear of missing out on opportunities.

Find answers
Your team needs data to answer these questions:

  • For which industries is our solution a great fit?
  • Which of these industries can generate most sales and highest margin?
  • Which industries are most profitable, lowering their barrier to buy from us?
  • How many companies are there in each of our targeted industries?
  • What is our market share and growth opportunity across these industries?

Take action
There are 1,000 industries in the US, defined by NAICS codes (North American Industry Classification System). Each industry is segmented by employee count. For companies servicing B2B in the US, it is crucial to understand the “Perfect Customer” and compare against their existing customer base:

  1. Download the RealZips NAICS industries spreadsheet, divided by employee size.
  2. In the spreadsheet, pull out industries you consider selling to.
  3. Eliminate companies by employee size, that you should not serve.
  4. Compare against existing customers. The difference is your total opportunity.

Chances are your total market is much larger than your current customer base. Continue to narrow down industries and company sizes. Focus on markets segments where your team will be able close deals fast, with highest possible revenue and margin. Carefully seek out segments with the highest possible stickiness (customer retention / repeat business).

The goal is to find a “Perfect Customer” profile in highly targeted industries.

2. Geography

Focus on markets with highest potential
Once you have a defined your targeted industries by employee size, selecting geographic areas is next. Attempting to serve large geographic areas often leads to inefficient marketing and sales. Therefore, combining industry and geographic focus is crucial for organizations ramping up customer acquisition.

Challenges
Companies that rely on inside sales teams often believe geography does not impact the sales process, since they can engage customers remotely. This could not be more wrong, since geography directly impacts the buying process. Time zone is important, when sending email and making calls. Distance is crucial, when inside sales set up meetings of field reps. Regulations and taxation on state and county levels impact your ability to sell. Never underestimate the importance of your customer’s customers. Focus on geographical areas, where you can help your customer serve a thriving market!

Field sales teams are directly impacted by territory size and market potential across their territories. Many sales reps have failed, either because they were given either too small or too large of a territory. Even if your territories are sized right, are you giving the sales team guidance to focus on geographical growth hotspots?

Find answers
Achieving geographic growth raises many hard questions:

  • Where will we find clusters of companies in our chosen target industries?
  • Are we geographically organized to tap into these industry clusters?
  • Does marketing focus on hotspots in each territory, to drive lead generation?
  • Are we generating leads close to each field reps home office, to drive efficiency?
  • Can sales reps segment their territories by low, medium, and high growth areas?

Take action
This is where the RealZips app is used to enable the sales team: Your defined target industries are divided across every Zip code, to identify market potential. Each Zip code in RealZips will showcase the number of target companies, rolled up into cities, metropolitan areas, and sales territories.

Next, each Zip code will automatically have the number of existing leads, customers, contacts, activities and opportunities. It is now possible to compare your market potential, against your existing customers.

Lastly, Zip codes are automatically indexed based on market potential and current performance. From that moment, your team can focus on growth areas and track market share:

 

3. Company

Pick targeted companies in the right areas
You will now know which geographical areas – based on Zip codes – hold the highest growth opportunity. It is now time to identify the companies – across select industries – within the Zip codes that will quickly generate revenue.

Getting data is not the challenge. Instead, selecting the right data and methodically getting in touch with the right companies is the right areas is the hard part.

Challenges
When sourcing companies for targeting, it’s very common to cast a too wide of a net. Since data is cheap, why not get all company names we can? This presents a number of challenges, such as how to assign all the data to the right sales team. Having a access to a lot of company data easily gets in the way of running focused marketing and sales activities, not to mention how quickly data deteriorates.

Find answers

  • What are the exact company profiles we are targeting, within our defined industries?
  • Where can we reliably source the company data, preferably integrated with Salesforce?
  • When importing thousands of records into Salesforce, how do we automatically associate the data with sales regions, territories and sales reps?

Take action
It’s time to further narrow down companies: By location types such as headquarters, years in business, credit rating, use of certain technology, and by dollar spend within the solution you provide. Instead of acquiring large amount of company data your team will never use, focus on high-growth geographic areas.

There are many great sources for company data. As the company data is integrated into your Salesforce system, the RealZips app will automatically associate each record with the right sales territory and sales team. The app structures each record by geographic areas such as city, county, metropolitan area. RealZips for Salesforce can even provide the distance to closest sales rep, office, distributor and service location.

4. Title

Source contacts with the right titles
You now have the right industries, in the right geographic areas, and the right companies your team will target. It’s now time to decide which titles your team will build relations with.

Most often it makes sense to start high in organization, and ask whom to talk to about your solution. It’s also important to get in touch with key stakeholders that influence the decision, and get their buy-in.

Challenges
Sourcing contact data from e.g. LinkedIn and add to Salesforce can be time consuming, even if your team is using automated apps that pull the contact data. Getting reliable email addresses is another challenge. Carefully evaluate how to acquire contact data within your select companies. Avoid at all costs to burden outbound sales reps and account executives to source contact data, since it will slow their sales efforts tremendously.

Find answers

  • How can we effectively source quality data on contacts in the right positions?
  • How do we reach out and open up discussions with these contacts?
  • Which message will resonate with the titles we select to reach out to?
  • How do we keep our contact database up to date?

Take action
Your highly targeted approach is now tapping into narrow segments of similar companies, in similar geographic areas, with people in the same positions. Your team can now run micro-campaigns with highly targeted messaging, across your highly defined audience.

While seeding a CRM system with companies and contacts, it’s extremely important to provide all territories and sales teams with as equal opportunities as possible to motivate and empower the team to reach sales quota. Many companies discover they need to optimize their sales territories at this point, enabling the sales team to succeed.

The RealZips app provides key metrics across each sales territory in real-time, used to help the team reach leads and contacts with the right titles:

 

5. Demography

Utilize underlying demographic data, to identify your customers’ markets
Most companies selling Business to Business (B2B) have yet to discover the value of demographic data. Demographic data is still considered to be “Big Data; too big to use while servicing B2B customers.

We’re now seeing the cutting-edge B2B sales management and sales operations teams take full advantage of demographic data. They simply use population data to understand their customers’ markets, providing talking points and insights downstream in the sales channel.

Challenges
Traditionally, demographic data could not be associated with a specific customer location and did not provide any added value. Demography has been hard to match in real-time against customer locations and linked to revenue growth.

Find answers

  • What are the demographic drivers, either for us and for the downstream sales channel?
  • How can demographic data be used to improve marketing and sales activities?
  • How can localized demographic data be presented in every sales pitch?

Take action
We’re now witnessing companies combine demographic data with all other data in Salesforce, using our app RealZips. The results are surprisingly effective. For example, sales reps showcase demographics around the doctor’s office they are visiting. The customer is given immediate insights into their local consumer market, helping them to identify their growth opportunity associated with your product!

Time and again, we’re seeing this approach generate unexpected new revenue, since your team is now providing unique data, helping your customer connect with their customers.

6. Pitch

Market and sell in the right place, to the right customer, at the right time
We’re now seeing more and more proactive companies use the RealZips for Salesforce app to effectively combine the steps outlined above. Their revenue acceleration can often be noticed within weeks.

With the RealZips GeoData Platform in place, they manage territories and grow revenue. They automatically structure all their CRM data, and break down target markets into manageable geographic chunks. They unleash their marketing and sales activities in highly targeted areas – learning what works best – as they improve their sales process.

High-growth companies effectively adjust the pitch as they discover what works best across targeted industries, geographic areas, companies and certain titles. They utilize all structured data they now have available in Salesforce, to even better service their targeted customer segments.

Get started in a matter of days
The RealZips app and market data is designed to instantly empower your team. In a matter of days, your team could start taking advantage of these six steps:

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.