Company map: seeing sales territories by province and industrial zone

How many companies do we have in each province? Which industrial zone have we never visited? Where do our customers cluster? If you want to answer these three questions at a glance, without opening a spreadsheet, what you are looking for is a company map. A table gives you the numbers; a map shows where those numbers gather. For a manager who plans sales, that is the real difference.

A company map is a sales planning view that shows the company portfolio on geographic layers such as province and industrial zone, and separates prospects, customers and former customers. In this article we explain how to use the map to plan sales territories, using YazSis CRM AI.

Why is a table not enough?

In a table, provinces are sorted alphabetically or numerically, but the geographic relationship between them is not visible. Three companies in the same industrial zone are three separate rows in a table; the person planning visits has to go through the addresses one by one and work out for themselves which ones are next to each other. A map makes this relationship visible: nearby companies fit into a single visit round, distant ones into another day. The same holds for the sales manager; which territory is crowded and which is empty is understood without counting rows. A table is indispensable for filtering and sorting, but when the question is “where”, the map is the only tool the eye can read without effort.

Two levels: Turkey and province

• Turkey map: Shows company density across the 81 provinces. At first glance you see in which provinces the portfolio is crowded and in which it is thin.
• Province page: Opens the dot map of the province you select. The prospect, customer and former-customer layers can be switched on and off separately.
• Industrial zone layer: Also shows the industrial zones inside the province; field sales can thus be planned zone by zone.
• Filters: The map is filtered by type, owner, source, sector and tag. For example, you can display only the prospects in a particular sector, or only one salesperson’s companies.

Why think in terms of industrial zones?

Similar businesses cluster side by side in industrial zones. The sectors, needs and decision-making styles of companies in the same zone are often close to one another; what you learn from a conversation with one company can guide you with its neighbor. Moreover, visiting several companies inside a single zone on the same day takes far less travel and time than visiting the same number of companies scattered across different provinces. Province-level density tells you where to look, and the industrial zone layer tells you exactly where to go within that province. This distinction also makes it easier to divide up territory responsibilities, especially for companies whose team is spread across several provinces.

Three questions the map answers

1. Where should we concentrate? A province where your portfolio is thin but where you know industry is dense stands out at first glance. Sales investment is steered by the gaps on the map, not by intuition.
2. Where are the former customers? The former-customer layer shows which territories are the priority for win-back calls. Former customers near companies that are still your customers are among the first candidates to try for win-back.
3. Who is looking where? The owner filter shows whether the salespeople’s territories are balanced and whether two people are working the same territory without knowing about each other.

From the map to the weekly plan

A fictional week: the sales manager first looks at the Turkey map and picks a province where the portfolio is small. On the province page they open the industrial zone layer and display the prospect and former-customer layers together. They notice that in one industrial zone the number of customers is low and the number of prospects is high. They narrow the sector filter, turn the resulting companies into a call list and assign it to a salesperson. The salesperson first makes phone calls and, for the positive ones, plans a single visit day in the same zone. The map does not make decisions on its own here; it links choosing the territory, building the list and planning the visit. At the end of the week the manager goes back to the same province page, assesses the situation in the territory by looking at the results the salespeople recorded, and picks next week’s territory. The plan thus becomes the repetition of the same three steps every week: look at the map, build the list, record the result.

Three things to watch when using the map

• Do not mix the layers. Opening the prospect, customer and former-customer layers together is sometimes useful, but when building a call list choose clearly which layer you are targeting.
• Look at the map regularly, not just once. As the portfolio changes, so does the density; a short territory meeting at regular intervals is enough.
• Keep the data up to date. If the owner, source, sector and tag are not entered correctly on the cards, the filters mislead too. The value of the map comes from the order of the records behind it.

The company map is one of the parts of YazSis CRM AI that is used today in YazSis’s own support and sales center. We define the scope of an installation adapted to your organization together with you after a needs analysis. You can explore the province map, call lists and the opportunity pipeline on the YazSis CRM AI page. The company and contact details shown in the screens on the product page are demo data.