Lead Intelligence

How Sales Teams are Thriving with Lead Intelligence and Sales Tracking Software

We all know the old adage “work smarter, not harder.” In recent years, this has become a mantra for many outside sales teams as technology has exploded, leading to all kinds of sales and lead tracking software and apps. Those who are incorporating these services into their sales processes are seeing huge returns and much faster growth.

A lot of these services (including ours) offer what is called “location intelligence,” a crucial part of the sales data revolution. This is especially true for those in outside, field, or door-to-door sales-- the branch of sales that is most concerned with location. When strategically addressing the issue of location, outside sales teams will see arguably the largest boost to their productivity and efficiency.

This article is designed to help reps, managers, and executives better understand what location intelligence means, how it impacts their business, and how they can utilize it to trim costs, accelerate sales efforts, and strategically expand.

What is Location Intelligence?

First, let’s get a definition. Location Intelligence is basically the interpretation and analysis of data in its geographic context. In other words, it’s location-based information.

All kinds of companies and other organizations use Location Intelligence to do their jobs more effectively:

Farmers use it to analyze everything from soil health to moisture distribution in order to be more precise with their resources.

Healthcare strategists use it to measure population densities and identify ideal site locations.

Retailers use it to measure market opportunities and consumer demographics to strategically place new stores.

Insurance companies use it to maintain healthy amounts of clients and risk thresholds.

And you use it! Every time you are using your GPS, checking traffic, buying a new house, or looking for the closest grocery store, you’re using location intelligence.

You already have to think about locations every day, both in your personal and business lives. The trick is to start collecting, interpreting, and acting on location intelligence data so that you can eliminate inefficiencies, cut costs, and take advantage of opportunities that you were previously unaware of. Fortunately, there is sales tracking software like SalesRabbit that incorporates location intelligence data, making this much easier for you.

Why is it so important to implement?

It is a near guarantee that your business would benefit from greater attention to location-based data. This is especially true in the segments we service, which predominantly feature outbound sales teams— the kind that go door-to-door, B2B, or do other forms of field sales. Almost all of their business data has some kind of location-based component, whether it’s a lead address, customer address, area assignment, target market, etc.

For these segments, location is often the most important data-point, because location is the primary data-point that ties your information to the real world. Since this data is so strongly grounded in reality, acting on location intelligence often provides the most immediate results.

Here’s what we mean by that: anytime outside sales teams are looking to optimize their process, there’s an element of location intelligence involved. For example, a company or team can lower costs and increase the number of contacts made each day by decreasing the amount of time/distance between contacts. If a team is using a setter/closer model, they can collect location data and figure out the optimal setter/closer ratio and assign sales areas accordingly. If you’re looking to expand, you can strategically discover new markets that guarantee strong results.

Here are some ways that you can start incorporating location intelligence into your business approach:

Tracking Leads Effectively

Start Collecting Smarter Data

The best way to begin incorporating Location Intelligence into your sales process is to increase the amount of data you collect in your interactions overall. It may seem contradictory given the location intelligence framework, but if all you know about a lead is their name, address, or phone number, you’re not setting yourself up for success.

Building a proper foundation for a data-driven company means actually HAVING data. Every sales team should be finding more ways to collect, analyze, and act on lead and customer information.

You are probably already doing this to some extent. A lot of our clients create or modify data as they progress through their sales process. But some even go in completely blind and don’t know anything about a prospect other than their address. Unfortunately, these sales teams don’t gain much more data than that over the course of the sales process, and so few strategic decisions can be made based on the data.

Here’s what we mean by that. Pretend you were a sales manager of a solar sales team. You’re going through lead information trying to make some kind of strategic decisions about next steps. Unfortunately, all your leads look something like this: “John Smith, 24 W Washington Ave.”

That’s not a lot to go on, and so you aren’t able to make any strategic decisions with that information other than knowing how close Mr. Smith lives.

But imagine your reps had been trained (and had the tools) to collect much more information about a prospect. Instead, when you’re browsing through lead information, you’d see “John Smith, 24 W Washington Ave, strong credit, married, four kids, 100k salary, 1600 sq ft roof.” That is actionable information that you can make strategic decisions around. Maybe that size of roof is perfect for your product because it optimizes solar energy creation. Maybe your solution is credit dependent and you now know that Mr. Smith is worth your resources.

This is called identifying your target buyer, and it can also be applied to markets on the whole. It’s the best way to sell, but it requires you collecting as much data as possible about prospects and customers. We’ve made it easy for our customers to do by allowing them to generate custom fields. If you’re not sure where to get started, here’s a basic overview:

Locating and Targeting

Your Ideal Market

As you can see in the list of example industries that we provided earlier, they are all using location intelligence to place themselves in the right place at the right time. Nobody wants to build a large hospital in the middle of nowhere-- they’ll go under before they can ever become self-sustaining. If an insurance company takes on too much risk at once, they won’t be able to run successfully. All of these companies need to know where to be.

This is probably even more important for a company like yours. You need to be aware of where the demand is and how to efficiently meet it. You should always be asking yourself location driven questions: What is our highest performing area? What is it about that area that provides such great opportunity? What other areas have the potential for similar performance?

This is what we mean by “target market”. Your target market is wherever you have a high density of ideal buyers who aren’t having their needs met. A big part of determining your target markets is discovering who your ideal buyers are.

Identify Ideal Buyer

If you’ve already been selling for any period of time, then identifying your ideal buyer is pretty straightforward. Just ask yourself: who buys from us the most? Who are my easy sells? Who benefits the most from our offering? That’s your ideal buyer.

Of course, it will really benefit you to build an ideal buyer as specifically as possible. It may take a little more research and data to really develop a complete buyer persona. In fact, you should never really stop developing it; constantly collect information about your customers and incorporate your learnings into your buyer persona profile.

Here are the main characteristics you should focus on as you start identifying your ideal buyer:

Age

No need to be super specific here, but people who are in different stages of life are naturally going to have different spending habits and generate demand for different products and services. Aligning your offering and messaging with your ideal age group will increase your deals.

Lifestyle

Different products fit more naturally into different lifestyles. What kind of lifestyle does your ideal client have, and what does that tell you about them? A customer with a family-oriented lifestyle might be more likely to invest in a product that helps keep their family secure.

Spending Power

Everyone has different financial situations and that affects how much money they can spend and what they’re going to spend it on. Someone who is barely making mortgage payments isn’t going to invest in a huge upgrade for their home, for example. Be aware of your offering and consider how it fits into your ideal customers’ financial picture.

Location

There’s a reason you’re not going to struggle to find a Tractor Supply store in downtown New York City— there’s no demand. Different buyers live in different areas and housing types, so be sure to understand where and how your ideal buyer likes to live.

If you’re selling B2B, you can approach things with the same mindset, but around different questions. These will change for each industry, but here are some good general things to consider:

Company Size and Type

Different sizes of companies have different needs. Ask yourself: is your ideal customer’s company small or large? Will they be growing aggressively in the next few years? How will their needs change as they grow?

Primary Decision Maker

Who at a company is the one that decides whether or not they choose to purchase your product? What are their unique pain points that other members of the company might not be experiencing? As far as location is concerned, it’s also worth knowing where the primary decision maker is located. You don’t want to waste resources going from office to office only to find out that none of your conversations have been with the right person.

Pain Points

Every company has specific pain points that are most preventing them from growing. When you can identify these pain points, you can position your offering to address their most crucial issues. This drastically increases the target company’s emotional attachment to your service.

While you should be constantly improving your buyer persona, don’t wait until you’ve got the perfect persona to get started. Even if you’ve just got a rough sense for who you’re selling to, get started canvassing and recording what you find in a lead tracking app. The more you sell and collect consumer data, the more refined your buyer profiles will get and the more effectively you can sell to the right people over a long period of time.

Once you’ve established a buyer persona, you can use location intelligence to strategically target these buyers and spend time where these people are. Simply take the information you have about your ideal buyer and use it to make educated guesses about where you can find them.

Sometimes this is a really obvious assumption. If your ideal buyer leads a lavish lifestyle, then chances are they live on a nice property. Don’t waste time in apartment complexes or lower-income neighborhoods. If your ideal buyer has a strong credit score, you can use location intelligence and soft credit score data to target areas or even individual homes that are prime candidates for your service. Some products/services are so universal that the ideal buyer might just be anyone who has a yard or owns a home. Then you can use location intelligence to target areas with large yards or a high percentage of homeowners.

Other times you can gather much more industry-specific data and use it to locate target markets. Some of our clients are internet providers, and we help them map out their current coverage areas so that their reps know where people qualify for their services, who their current customers are, and the different offerings they have available in each area. They save a lot of time and resources because their sales and marketing approaches are so precise.

Once you identify your ideal buyer and market, you can use location intelligence to develop a highly-targeted sales approach that is vastly more efficient than any other approach.

Selling Strategically

Location Intelligence is great when it’s informing macro decisions like market positioning, but it’s also a great way for individual reps and sales teams to sell strategically within those target markets.

There are a lot of ways to use location information to sell strategically, but here are a few examples:

Use a Lead Tracking App

If you’re tracking your leads via paper, email lists, traditional CRMs, etc., then you’re not going to effectively work them. Geo-spatial lead tracking software is much more effective because it gives reps and managers a quick visual representation of their areas and leads. That makes it much easier to make strategic decisions that are informed by the locations of leads, appointments, and more. A lead tracking app is the easiest way to save time and cut travel costs.

Like we mentioned earlier, it’s better if that app can record and track industry-specific information so that you can make smarter decisions. That means reps can make smarter decisions in the field, closers can make smarter decisions with their time, managers can make smarter decisions with area assignments, and execs can make smarter decisions about product positioning and market expansion.

Clover-Leafing / Customer Tracking:

The same goes with customers. If you have a list of local customers but aren’t tracking their location, then it’s difficult to incorporate them into your sales process. Make sure you have sales tracking software to map out your customers and use that info to your advantage.

Start with the customers and ask for referrals. Contact these referrals strategically based on whatever information you can get from the customer. After speaking with the customer, you can then canvass around them and incorporate them into your pitch: “We were just in the area to check up on the Smiths, and they’re loving their new solar panels. You’ve got a similar setup here-- would you like to see how much they’re saving?” The same type of pitch works for almost every industry.

No matter how productive your time with customers ends up being, you’ll at least save time by not wasting resources on people who are already buying from you.

Geomarketing

Geomarketing is a form of marketing that uses location to determine its audience. Usually this is accomplished by selecting an area, collecting all the digital device IDs in that area, and using that information to send digital ads to those devices.

This is a great way to build brand awareness and inform prospects because you can use location to pinpoint your target audience. For example, a car dealership can market to people at other car dealerships or auto repair shops by selecting those areas and collecting the device IDs of everyone who is getting a car fixed or shopping around. They then use a highly targeted message to address the needs of that audience, such as one that promotes great trade-in policies or competitive pricing.

And, since outside sales teams are almost always working geographically, this type of marketing is the perfect complement to their sales efforts. Teams can market to sales areas in a way that harmonizes directly with their sales efforts.

It’s also the perfect way to work with the modern buyer, who is used to doing a great deal of online research before making a buying decision. When you use geotargeted marketing, you can jumpstart a prospect’s consideration process by introducing them early to the concept of your product/service. Then, by the time a rep comes around, they’ve already had an opportunity to do some of their own research and feel like a more comfortable participant in the sales process.

Once you’ve established an ideal buyer, the combination of location intelligence and geomarketing is a great way to spread your message to the right people and increase your close rates in high-propensity markets.

Make Adjustments

Like we said, these are just a few ways that location intelligence can quickly improve your sales approach. Data is optimizing everything, and your company shouldn’t be any different.

But there’s not much point in data collection and analysis if you aren’t going to make adjustments based on your results. Initial business changes are always intimidating, and you may be skeptical that incorporating location intelligence into your system is worth the time and resources.

We’re happy to show you a more tailored approach for your company. Our sales experts have real-world experience with outside sales teams and know firsthand the results location intelligence can provide. They can guide you through the process and show you how your team can specifically make the adjustment and begin to benefit.

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What is SalesRabbit?

SalesRabbit is the complete outside sales app. A sales enablement service and mobile CRM designed specifically for outside sales, including field sales and door-to-door sales teams. Our canvassing app provides solutions for lead tracking, lead management, and all your other field sales and d2d needs.