A business mapping software is designed to support business users in many ways. One way is for segmenting and searching the user’s business data.
To begin with, import your data. We’ve talked about this before. Import a spreadsheet of location-based data – addresses of your customers, prospects, pharmacies, movie theaters, or polish meats retailers. Whatever data you got, pull it in and create that data visualization.
Consider the Query
With your data now displayed, symbolized, and color coded on a map (see previous weeks blog posts) you can now consider querying or searching for specific subsets of your data. Think about how you want to segment data. Do you want to query a list of zip codes or query your imported data? How about a 25 mile radius from zip code central – you designate the point? Or maybe you just want to see all points on the map that contain the word “furball” in the name. Regardless of what you want, you can perform a variety of data queries using business mapping software.
For instance, if you’ve imported a list of all the active bowling allies across the USA you can then break them into bowling alley regions by creating territories on the map. If you have a type column in your data you can color-code those bowling allies by big ball or small ball, or maybe by foot waitress or roller skate waitress. You could then look at all the bowling allies in the North East territory – just to pick a region in your territory mapping.
After querying by territory you will have a saved file of just the North East region. You can now view a map of just those NE bowling allies. Using filtering tools you can segment that list further by filtering by state, county, or zip code. Here you are simply selecting the zip code column and looking for all records within the zip code XXXXX. In fact, you should be able to filter based on any column in your imported data. With our application you can set up multiple filters with modifiers. This means you can perform greater than (>) and less than (<) filtering for numeric ranges of data. You could also conduct a ‘contains’ query, like “Find me all the CNA’s in my coverage area that contain the names ‘Jane’ and ‘Mike’.”
Radius & Polygon
By choosing radius or circle searches you can simply click a point on the map and drag out a distance. This converts to a circle and allows you to query the imported data or zip code layer within that circle. Now you can save that dataset for sales planning and routing purposes or for marketing list development. We get more requests for radius searches of zip codes than any other feature. Yes, you can easily search for all the zip codes within 50 miles of a point or address on the map, and then export that list of zip codes. It is wicked easy.
Try a polygon tool search too. In addition to creating territories, this tool is great because it lets you choose a specific shape to query. Perhaps you are a sales road warrior and you’ve imported a list of all the prospects in your territory. You can use the polygon tool to draw a rectangle around your planned street route for this week exposing all of the prospects located along your path of your planned sales trip. Export that list out to SalesForce.com and create a campaign with it. No excuses now!
Drive Time Too!
Also included in search tool options is drive time. You can use the drive time tool to display a jagged polygon that represents the drivable area surrounding a point that can be reached within X minutes of time. This calculation is based on the map street data – turn restrictions, one-ways/two-ways, speed limits and other critical drive time components – within the mapping application. The resulting polygons created can be used to query imported business data or administrative districts. So you can answer the question, “Which zip codes exist within 30 minutes’ drive time of my store location?”
Query results from business mapping applications can be exported from the map tool for use in third-party applications like CRM, scheduling, or other tools. You can also re-import a list segment for further symbolization or to create new map views.
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