Introducing CARTO SalesQuest: Location-Based Sales Analytics

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about how different business functions use Location Intelligence in very different ways to solve very different problems.

This has led customers to ask us if we would ever build specific solutions for use cases. Today, with years of experience and thousands of customer applications deployed, we’re excited to announce our first solution built on the CARTO platform: CARTO SalesQuest.

CARTO SalesQuest is a location-based Sales Analytics solution that applies spatial analysis and location data streams to your company’s sales CRM data, boosting your team’s sales performance.

Analyzing sales data and making strategic decisions to improve your sales team’s performance has traditionally relied on sales analytics tools that focus on when sales happen: How long is my team’s sales cycle? What is our pipeline for the next three months? What is our win rate for last fiscal quarter?

These are vitally important questions for a sales team, but in order to truly optimize your sales performance in real-time, you need the ability to ask questions about where sales happens:

• Where are there high-value opportunities in my team’s sales territory?
• Where should I hire, assign, and deploy additional field reps based on opportunity value?
• Where might there be potential new customers based on open data about demographics or consumer trends?

CARTO SalesQuest puts the power of location right in your sales rep’s hands, helping them to find locations of nearby prospects, visualize their customers according to time of last touch, or even prioritize sales visits based on opportunity value.

Boosting sales performance with location

We’ve spoken with lots of sales leaders about optimizing sales practices around: customer segmentation, sales territory design, and territory management.

While developing CARTO SalesQuest, we asked sales leaders what was most important for them in a sales analytics solution. Here’s what they said:

• Role-Based Access. Users can assign view access according to your organization’s internal structure to maintain workflows for existing sales territories.
• Mobile & Desktop Ready. Access SalesQuest in the office or in the field with a responsive design that adjusts to whatever size devices you and your sales team uses.
• CRM ready. SalesQuest is ready to plug and play with your existing CRM system.

These features are important, but we also knew that in order for sales teams to optimize in real-time, we would have to augment their CRM sales data with other location data streams.

What does this look like in the world of field sales?

A leading security company we work with was able to give their sales reps data about their opportunities that other companies weren’t able to provide. They used Open Data on crime statistics across the different cities their reps were assigned to in order to identify potential new business for alarm and security service sales.

Optimize sales visit schedules

In a recent Salesforce study, a large majority of sales representatives cited internal ineffieciencies as the cause for their team’s productivity gap. In fact, respondents admitted that on average only ⅓ of their work week is spent selling while the rest is spent on more administrative tasks.

Addressing this challenge is all about making the field experience more intuitive, making selling as easy as planning a route in Google Maps or booking a hotel in the ideal location on Booking.com. That’s precisely why SalesQuest is built on CARTO’s simple interactive map interface so that planning an efficient business trip is data-driven, but still simple. This allows your reps to:

• Visualize the location of nearby prospects, customers and sleepers. Minimize travel costs using route optimization when planning visits
• See customers according to time of last touch. Maintain customer satisfaction with balanced coverage across sales area
• Visualize nearby renewal opportunities. Reduce churn rates with visits to customers with expiring contracts
• Identify highest value opportunities. Prioritize sales visits by highest value customers and prospects

For one client, equipping field sales reps with SalesQuest has led to a 6% increase in ASPs recorded by sales representatives, a 9% increase in the number of clients visited per month, and a 12% decrease in travel time for sales representatives.

Identify sub-optimal sales behavior

Operations managers can also take advantage of the role-access view to analyze trends and patterns in sales behavior that could be putting their quota well out of reach.

Recently, a company’s head of sales for Europe found that the average selling price on new transactions had been decreasing significantly. The head of sales wanted to figure out how and where her sales team could change behaviors to make sure this trend didn’t continue.

The image below shows the map of CRM’s sales data, filtered to new business opportunities with an average price of $60,000 or less within the European sales region.

The distribution of opportunities is spread out across the continent, which doesn’t yet provide the head of sales with actionable insights on how best to change sales behavior. But filtering the sales data down to the time period when the most sales are closed, which tends to be the end of the quarter, may help identify which area is in need of help.

In the image below we see a drastic difference in amount of low-dollar new transactions during the end of the sales quarter in and around Germany.

Upon a closer look we can pinpoint that the most low-dollar new business transactions occur in the city of Hamburg, Germany.

This granular insight allowed the head of sales to begin implementing changes for this specific team on the ground, refocusing them on higher-value new opportunities, business expansion, and renewal opportunities.

Our team is ready and waiting to hear from you. What are your biggest sales optimization challenges? Where do you feel like you have sales blind spots? Reach out to our team to start a conversation!