Whose territory does a new prospect belong to?

Does this sound familiar to you? We talk to companies all the time who have problems with who to allocate a new customer or prospect to when they ring the sales or franchise company or call centre. Sales territories have always been a bit of a problem to deal with, but this will no longer be a problem for people who use GeoSmart’s new BIonaMAP business intelligence SaaS (Software as a Service) application.

Old school BAU (Business As Usual) is still the way most sales and service companies work. They pin a map on the wall, draw the territory on it with a sharpie pen and write the name on the map. There are always arguments over whether a territory includes both sides of the road, where the suburb boundaries are and don’t even start about what happens when you want to modify a territory.

Queen Street

If the call centre or people taking the calls don’t have access to the map when new customers ring, there can be major time wasting and potential for problems ensuring that the right person is dealing with the client quickly and professionally in order to secure new business. There are also issues over making sure the address is correct. There are a dozen Queen Streets in Auckland and we have heard plenty of stories about people driving up and down a road in the wrong suburb looking for a client they are meant to be meeting with. Then there are vanity suburbs like the person on Remuera Road who say they are in Remuera, but they are actually in Newmarket and knowing which numbers of the street belong in which territory. It is a problem that has been around for years.

This problem goes away with BIonaMAP and there are a number of ways that we can deal with it. Some companies are simply going to use a query on the BIonaMAP home page which effectively allows you to start entering the address, with an autocompleter allowing you to select from a drop down menu to get the right one. Some companies are going to integrate this function right into their accounting software, CRM or other business database application, which means that the full correct address with Post Code and correct suburb as well as the coordinates are recorded into the right fields.

What makes this different? Database applications on their own can deal with suburbs or post codes, but typically can not deal with spatial queries, i.e. in what territory or polygon does this belong to? The answer effectively will be one of the following:

• It belongs in Territory X.
• It appears in Territory X and overlapping Territory Y (e.g. a sales and a service territory)
• It doesn’t appear in any territory

If this is an issue that you have to grapple with in your business, why not contact us and ask us how BIonaMAP can help you?

BIonaMAP is available for New Zealand and Australia and has a host of location based business analytics capability. It is Software as a Service which means no software installation and it can be accessed by using a web browser. We also welcome inquiries from sales, service, franchise and other business consultants, resellers and systems integrators.

Giving Location Based Business Intelligence to Middle Management

In the traditional corporate environment location based information about your business tends to come from the IT or GIS department. This tends to result in traditional reports based on historic requirements. They tend to be standard reports that you receive in the same way as you receive your financial reports. In New Zealand only large corporates even have access to GIS data. BAU (Business As Usual) means results as usual at best, but if someone else is working smarter, that means that they are likely to be taking business off yours.

Our BIonaMAP application changes that. There is no installation required and it is now simple for a Sales Manager, Service Manager, Product Manager, Marketing Manager and others to have access to what is going on in their business in ways they haven’t been able to before.

One of the most basic areas I have found in previous lives as a Sales Manager and as a Franchisor has been creating fair territories on a map. This traditionally involved buying a map, using a sharpie pen to create a territory and covering it in different colours of map pins. Of course as soon as you created a territory and needed to change it, it was start again and of course now your office wall is covered in holes. Now it is as simple as clicking with your mouse and your new territory has been created. Zoom in on the map to tidy it up so that you can split streets up to left and right if necessary and now you can start viewing what is going on in your business.

Understanding what is happening in a territory

Any information you have about your customers in a CRM, accounting software that you can export can now be viewed on the map and you can run queries about that data and view the results straight away on the map. Examples might be profitable customers, customers who haven’t bought anything in the last month, customers who buy one product but not another, prospects who use a competitors product. You can count results and compare territories with each other with ease. Why is one territory better than another?

I wish I had browser based software like this in the past, it is just so powerful and easy. What information would you like to unlock from your business? Find out more at www.bionamap.co.nz

Route Optimisation Is Simple and Accessible

I’ve blogged about route optimisation many times recently. One recent blog talked about Fleet Management, our new BIonaMAP application and some other wonderful concepts, as ideas on how to save your business money and time and thereby increasing productivity and productivity.

I would like to break this down a little bit because there is a misconception out there that all of this technology requires spending lots of money and installing expensive equipment in your company vehicles. Let me break it down for you. There are some wonderful solutions out there, many of which are offered by our valued partners and they all have a purpose and fulfil business needs. Some business problems are complex and require complex solutions and some are simple and provide very quick return on investment.

So here is a simple problem. You have one or more vehicles which need to go out on the road and do several jobs. They may be regular runs, or they may be different each day. Let’s make it even simpler. Let’s break it down to one vehicle. You may have lots of vehicles, but let’s just look at one of them.

Here we have a merchandiser, who has to visit a number of supermarkets. One person has to visit 9 grocery stores, checking their stocks, managing the shelf placement, demonstrating new products, taking orders. As do many field sales people in New Zealand and Australia, their territory comprises of urban calls and calls out in the country and they spend a lot of their time driving.

The problem is that you can only fit so much time in a working day. You can have a pretty good idea of what order to do the jobs in, probably the order you always do them in. The other problem is that the price of petrol is going up, prices are coming down and your budget is going up. You need to get smarter.

Our Route2GO Lite application is a simple web service. There is no software to be installed, no set up fees and as Software as a Service you only pay for what you use. In this case person, who is a great sales person, spent 28 1/2 hours in the car, dead  time between calls in order to make those essential visits. Route2GO worked out how she could do the same visits but spending only 22 hours in the car. Now she can either fit in more calls in the same amount of time or spend more time with each client enhancing the relationship, doing product knowledge training with their staff and increasing the average sales she generates from those clients, which reduces the pressure on her and her sales manager to get the results the company needs.

We also cut over 400km in driving distance from this sales trip. At even $1 per km that’s a lot of money going back to the bottom line.

So what do you need in order to achieve a result like this? A PC with a web browser. An account with GeoSmart and a little time. For this run which included 9 clients and returning to base with a pile of orders, the total cost to GeoSmart would have been $6.25. No hidden surprises, that’s it. This includes the fee for geocoding (generating coordinates for calculating the route) and the optimisation from the office, to the 9 stores and back to the office. Oh and the cost of a piece of paper if you want to print off the above map and route.

It really is that simple. If you want to know more, why not contact us? We’ll even do a couple of runs for you for free, preferably ones you have already done previously so you can get a genuine comparison as to whether it will work for you. This was a dramatic example, in some cases it might only save you a little, but if we could help you visit one or two more customers in a trip without increasing your fixed overheads, every trip, hat would that add up to over a year?

We have more information about route optimisation in our blogs, so why not have a scroll through and see if you can find an example that’s relevant to your business. In an upcoming blog I will explain in simple terms what route optimisation actually is and why we can do it better than you can drawing pictures on a map. The key point of this exercise is that you can achieve dramatic results without putting in any money upfront and without having to buy any technology you don’t already have. Route2GO is available for New Zealand and Australia.

Adding Game Mechanics and Location To Loyalty Cards

Following on from my last blog Adding Location to Loyalty Cards, an area that I feel is really important is game mechanics. One of the problems with loyalty cards is that they are inherently boring and there are lots of them. We live in a world of constant distraction and we want instant gratification. However that gratification doesn’t have to be a free air ticket or turbo food processor with Ginzu knives. It can be as simple as points or recognition and applications today need to evolve as the public become more tech savvy on their mobiles.

What is game mechanics and how is it relevant? Playing games is part of who we human animals are. Games are a natural part of entertainment and education, whether it is a child doing its first jigsaw puzzle, or the All Blacks heading into a rugby match at that international world competition for a cup. Yes, ultimately no matter how passionate we are about success, Graham Henry and the NZRFU themselves said “It’s just a game.”

Games are immensely popular and computer and mobile  offers massive revenue potential. Gartner predicts that the global video game industry on its own will generate revenues of over US$112 billion by 2015. That doesn’t even take into consideration mobile. Application developers have been all over Facebook, now on Google+ and on devices such as iPhone, iPad and Android and now developers of smart location based games and marketing applications are heading the same way.

Developers are looking to use our interest and passion for playing games to influence the behaviour of consumers and it is working. One obvious area is in the retail, travel, tourism, attraction, hospitality and entertainment industries. Of course as I have outlined in many recent blogs, loyalty is a key aspect that all of these industries are looking for, or in other words, profitable repeat business.

So what aspects should a loyalty application include. A major one is achievements. I’ve talked about reward and that rewards don’t have to be tangible items. A reward can be points such as the points used by Foursquare when you check into a location. They also have badges and mayorships which are either the reward itself or their may be special deals or offers made to those people who come in regularly. The new Tap City game allows you to earn virtual dollars for checking in. One of the great things about group loyalty operations is the ability to cross market, for example using a passport concept where the more locations you check in to, the more rewards you get.

The appointment dynamic is extremely powerful. This is where you want people to do something at either a predetermined time or an ad hoc time. For example a restaurant that is always quiet between 3PM and 5PM on a particular day of the week might offer incentives within the application to get more business at that time of day. The concept I like the most, is pushing deals when you have inventory you want to use in a hurry. An example might be the special of the day in a restaurant where you haven’t sold as much as you catered for. The classic story I often use of a jet boat that is going out in 20 minutes with 5 empty seats. This is a perfect opportunity to push a deal to people who are close by and have opted in to be offered deals. The cost differential between having 4 or 9 passengers is negligible but the fun and entertainment factor of 9 people screaming as the boat does a 360 degree spin is significantly greater for all, including the 4 who paid full price. There is also a potential dynamic of more people seeing them having fun and therefore wanting to have a go themselves. The same could apply to any attraction, like the luges in Auckland and Queenstown.

Queenstown Luge

I can come up with a hundred concepts for different types of locations for cafe’s, restaurants, attractions, theatres, travel, accommodation, entertainment, retail, sport, tourism and so can you.

I will continue this blog next week with more thoughts on game mechanics or gamification that you might like to consider in your location based application. Remember, GeoSmart has all the data and tools you ned to make these ideas possible and whilst we don’t develop these sorts of applications ourselves, we have many partners who are keen to assist you if you want to take advantage of the opportunities now possible because of the large number of people using location aware mobiles. The question is how much extra business would you like?

Maybe you would like to join the discussion and leave a comment of your own to add to the mix?

Location and Shopping – Tomorrow Becomes Today

This morning I was watching a podcast on Unterther.TV which was an interview with Ken Harlan of MobileFuse, a Mobile advertising network. Their core business is publishing ads on mobile applications and web pages, but the discussion that got my interest was about people using their own Smartphone devices to do their shopping. This piqued my interest because one of the areas of shopping in the future is about navigating the grocery store and shopping interests.

GeoSmart is often found at the leading edge of location based technology, working with partners to come up with new applications and helping build the future that one day we will take for granted.

Sky and Sainsbury’s Supermarkets have collaborated to put iPad mounts with chargers in supermarket trolleys. The story suggests you might like to watch sport news and other entertainment.

The idea sort of appeals to me, but I can hear my wife saying “Don’t You Dare!”

But there are more powerful opportunities and I’m sure where Sainsbury’s really want to head with a company like MobileFuse would go something like this:

1. A Sainsbury App that gives you access to their product list including using your Smartphone scanner as you consume product at home to generate your shopping list. When you are ready to go shopping, the app would navigate you to the nearest store to your current location or a selected location such as your home or other destination, so your frozen goods stay cold.

2. Having checked in, you could be notified of any friends or family that are also in the store, or in the neighbourhood, or not:)

3. The App gets to know the sort of things you like to buy and shows you ads of similar products that may be of interest. This could include showing you videos about the product as you are walking around the store, it might even share recipes for you.

4.  Where I get excited is that it could show you where to find all the products you want, in effect order the shopping list so that it lets you know which product to get next as you go down the aisle so you don’t miss anything. In a chain, location based mapping and indoor navigation information could be uploaded for any store in the country, so that anywhere you go, you don’t need to know the layout.

5. This brings in loyalty programs that recognise you and offers you deals based on products that meet your profile and would be of interest to you.

6. You scan your products into the basket in the same way as they have done in stores like Albert Hein in the Netherlands, but the difference is that you do it on your own device and probably also have contact-less payment at the check out.

This may sound futuristic but self scanning was a struggle to introduce not that long ago. I think in a few years time you might find yourself doing it. Hopefully we will have assisted in this.

More on Group Deals and Prescience

Seems like I was on the mark in my blog in July about the huge volume of one day type web sites and that people will quickly get sick and tired of the bombardment of deals. So many of us today are getting huge numbers of time wasting emails, offering us everything from holidays to lucky dip bags. A story in Ad Age Digital this morning says that the trend is now definitely heading downwards in the US.

Yelp, is cutting down its Yelp Deals staff in half as outlined by CNN today and Facebook announced this week that they are shutting down Facebook Deals after originally suggesting that they were going to make huge inroads into Groupon’s business.

Just to reiterate, the problem isn’t the deals. The shear number of sites offering daily deals and bombarding consumers is a fad and most, as I predicted will quietly disappear as they find there is too much competition and they can’t make a profit or reach critical mass for a harvest or sale. As I have already said, retailers aren’t making money from these deals (generalisation) and where they do use the deals to get people into their premises, they don’t seem to be coming back for a second visit once they have their deals.

I will shortly come back to the new strategy that has much more potential to generate positive cash flows for all concerned which is off course location or  proximity based marketing. There will of course be a spate of these and many of the same developers will be jumping on the bandwagon, but they will find that it is much harder than they think and they will struggle to get many retailers on board for reasons I have discussed previously.

All is not lost and proximity based marketing / check ins has huge potential. However it is something that takes an understanding of destination business, game theory, loyalty, what people actually need and want, knowledge about location based services and much more. Areas that we can help with. Get it right and this is a huge business opportunity for all, get it wrong and people will be turned off and it will take much longer to achieve the results that we are predicting.

Consumers are Checking In to Retail Stores

In my previous blog I pointed out that that retailers were not adopting strategies for check in location based marketing. In the blog prior to that I quoted Comstat research that shows that in the first 3 months of this year 16.7 million people check into locations using Foursquare and similar applications, representing 7.1% of the total mobile population. I don’t know what the statistics are for New Zealand, but I suspect the numbers are somewhere between 5 and 7% of the NZ mobile user population.

Comstat also came up with some interesting statistics about the demographics of those users.

Firstly a lot of people think this is technology for men, that they are the geeks, but of course women love to shop, they are social shoppers and as the graph shows, there are in fact more women than men checking in!

The predominant age group should be no surprise, we would expect 18-44 year olds to be the most tech savvy and of course having disposable income for Smartphones which are the predominant mobile used for check ins. Again from Comstat for the first 3 months of this year in the USA Android pipped Apple at 36.6% to 33.7$ of devices used for checking in.

The largest group of users were in full time employment 46.6% and the second largest at 23.3% were full time students.

Just as a footnote to my blog on Group Deals and Bricks and Mortar Business there was an interesting story in eMarketer a couple of days ago. The story contained statistics that from research by Cooper Murphy Copywriters in July this year, 82% of Groupon users expressed dissatisfaction with the level of repeat business they generated from their campaigns and 49% would not use them again. This is interesting when many companies use daily deal type promotions to introduce new customers to their stores.

Of course you know where I am going with this series and that is that Location or Proximity Based Marketing offers far more compelling tools for retailers and other destination businesses to entice people into their premises. Obviously a fundamental component of that is not just how to get them to come to you, but how to get them there when you want them and to have them purchase or consume products or services that achieve your goals. For a retailer that might be those same products you were quitting on a daily deal, but like the Auckland superette owner who has been selling milk at 10 cents below cost as a loss leader, part of the strategy behind that is the opportunity to merchandise other products those same people will buy with a healthy profit margin. If you have an aged stock problem, location based marketing can get people into your store and while they enjoy the low price of your distressed inventory, put something at eye level in from of them that increases the profit of your sale. Cherry pickers do not make you profit.

Likewise if you have a cafe or restaurant, don’t just offer a free coffee with $5 worth of food. Offer it only at times when your business is empty and not to the people who were coming in anyway, they are dealt with using your normal loyalty program. Of course loyalty marketing is also very important and fits into location, but you’re going to have to come back to a future blog for that.

Thanks for reading our blog. If you think this is of interest to people you know, please tell them about it or send them a link. You can also subscribe using the RSS feed.

Retailers are not flocking to take advantage of free check in marketing services

I did some research looking for New Zealand business success stories with check in marketing. I really struggled to find any. I went and visited a number of businesses in retail and hospitality and most of them didn’t know what foursquare was. One gentleman in a cafe told me he knew about it, but was too busy to learn how to do it. I pointed out that it was really easy, but he said he really didn’t have time and then sat down to have a coffee with one of his customers. I understand on further research that this is how he keeps a loyal clientele which is great, but he could always find a student or someone else to do it for him.

I spoke to a number of people in retail that gave me a similar story. It seems, as is often the case that most managers are too busy working on their business to work in it. This is a trap in my humble opinion. It’s common knowledge that businesses like cafe’s and restaurants to name a couple, change hands about every 18 months, a classic bell curve that starts with ambitions and energy, hard work, great service and develops cash flow. Then they get into a pattern or flow of how they do business, stop innovating, perhaps stop having fun and start telling themselves how hard business is. When they started fresh, people enjoyed the new business, new products and faces and the passion flowing from the owner and staff.

The thing is, we have an amazing opportunity to capitalise on location here. Remember the old rule of successful retail “Location, Location, Location”? Well it isn’t enough to stay fresh these days. As consumers we are spoiled for choices and sometimes we need a push to either stay loyal, or to try something new. Location Based Marketing is as simple as going to foursquare and claiming your business. To be honest, claiming your business can be a little difficult in New Zealand from a validation perspective if you are in a non residential street (where NZ Post do not deliver mail) and I have tried to contact them about this, but you should persist.

The great thing with foursquare for now is that they provide you with lots of very easy ways to set up promotion. You really don’t even have to be marketing savvy, it’s all laid out for you. Go and have a look and check  out the Manager Tools. It is so easy. If you need more help, follow this blog and we will explain how to do it.

People are checking into your store and stores near you all the time, why not give them a reason to come into yours, unless you have more customers than you can deal with. The numbers of people using check in services is growing greatly.

Have a look at the bell curve above and imagine this is your business. How long have you been in business? Have a look at your financials, now see if you can plot them on the curve. Is business growing? Are you on the rise? Have you peaked, would you like to keep the rise going? If you are reading this, maybe you have made some time to work on your business, which is great. Know someone in business who could use a little help? Tell them about this blog. There is more information coming on how to do these things.

If you are already using check in services for your business, we would love you to leave a comment. If you are part of a chain or collaborative group and are not currently doing anything in this area, or and agency wanting ideas for your client, GeoSmart would love to help point you in the right direction. We don’t create loyalty applications, but we have business partners and clients who do. We also welcome questions.

I’ll leave you with a link to an article on BusinessDay News which suggests that Location Based Marketing could be worth US$6.2 Billion within a few years. Maybe there is something to it? Would you like a slice?

How to Get Listed on New Zealand Car Navigation Systems

I noticed that over the weekend someone had located our blog by searching on Google with the query “How to get listed on Car navigation systems”. I’m glad you asked and equally glad you found us because the answer if very easy.

GeoSmart provides the mapping information and Points of Interest (places to go) for the major car navigation brands in New Zealand including Navman, TomTom, Garmin Asus, Metroview and more. In addition to this, we also provide data for lots of other services including cartography and web mapping. The most popular web site we provide data for is AA Maps, which has huge traffic both domestic and international due to the affiliation of the NZ Automobile Association with other motoring associations around the world, so many tourist coming to NZ plan their NZ travel on that site. There are many more of course and some of these are showcased on our home page.

We are also finding many new clients in the mobile space, developing applications for iPhone and Android. They also use Points of Interest, so if you list with us you are very likely, if relevant to find your details on those applications as well, again at no charge to you.

So lets keep this simple. All you need to do is go to either the GeoSmart home page and click on the link:

Or go to the AA Maps home page and click on the icon that looks like this:

Simply follow the instructions that follow, which will allow you to quickly and easily add your business to our database for free.

You will have the ability to accurately identify the location of your business and chose from a selection of categories that represent your business, which is frequently multiple categories. For example a restaurant may also be a cafe and a take away. We will then validate your listing to ensure that you are authorised to make the entry on our database. Your data will then quickly be added to our data which is then updated by our clients and partners including the major car nav brands.

You will also be given the option of a free dynamic map with pan and zoom tools that you can post on your website for free. If people want driving directions to your location they can enter their starting address and be guided via AA Maps with full printable turn by turn directions and maps and even be able to check the real time traffic conditions before they go. All we ask in return is that you log onto your page and ensure your data is up to date at least once a year.

What if you are a chain? No problem, as long as you are authorised to represent your business, you can add as many of your business locations as you wish. Hopefully as a chain, we already have your data, but you may have new branches that we haven’t been told about, or some may have moved location, so please check on the AA Maps website to confirm we have all your current info.

Now that you will be listed on car navigation and in other applications, you can let people know in person, on your website, newsletters and other material, how they can find you. We look forward to helping send business your way.

Petrol Price Hikes and Route Optimisation

If you are in business and have a fleet of vehicles on the road, you will be very aware of the increase in the price of petrol. This morning’s story in the NZ Herald Business Section suggests that fuel prices won’t be going down soon. There is of course the tension in the Middle East which has driven oil prices as high as US$103 a barrel and the NZ exchange rate has suffered not only with the Christchurch Earthquake, but also the expectation that the Reserve Bank will cut the cash rate on March 10. This makes our currency less attractive and we have dropped 2 cents against the US dollar in the last month.

One option is to shop around. Cardlink has a website called Pricewatch, which shows what people who have their fuel cards are paying, but of course these are discounted prices. Prices vary around the country, but even then you will struggle to find anything below $2 if you consider $1.999 as being below $2.

The AA Petrol Watch web page suggests that the oil companies have only passed on half their increase in costs, so far. There has also been talk of shielding Christchurch of increases which is great, but of course the rest of us will have to subsidise that.

The problem from a business perspective is that whilst our running costs increase, our clients expect to pay the same or less for our products and services. If your products and services involve distribution, delivery or field work, this becomes a serious problem. This is a problem that GeoSmart may be able to assist with.

Our solution is Route Optimisation. We have a solution called Route2Go, which you may have read about in previous blogs. In simple terms, give us a list of the jobs that a vehicle has to do in a day and our solution will advise you which order to do them in, to drive the least distance and in the shortest time by calculating the fastest route. Even without the price rises in petrol, this is saving clients a lot of cost, but now it is even more attractive.

The best thing is that we offer you the chance to evaluate this product in relation to your unique business for free. As per the PDF which you can download below, if you would like to send us the addresses of 5 existing daily runs (we don’t need to know the names of the companies, or will provide a confidentiality agreement) in the order that they have been done, we will optimise them for free and send you the results.

Route2GO is a Software a a Service (SaaS) application which means there is nothing to install and no set up fee. You simply pay for the number of locations you optimise to. With the results of the free trial, you will be able to see exactly what your savings can be as a result of using the service.

What have you got to lose? Try us now. Please note this service is currently only available in New Zealand.

Route2GO Flyer

P.S. Did I mention green? If you are reducing the distance you drive you are of course also reducing your carbon footprint.

P.P.S. Optimisation can also mean that you can fit more jobs into a day without increasing your fixed overheads.