Salesforce Maps from Salesforce and Heat Map from App Solve can look similar at first sight. Both tools are built in Salesforce: the world’s #1 cloud platform. However, Heat Map is a proprietary product with unique features for telco and energy companies modeled by App Solve, a certified Salesforce implementation, and consulting partner.
If you already know your business needs a mapping software tool, this post is for you. If you don’t use a mapping tool as part of your business intelligence strategy, you may be missing out on vital information as most company data has a geographic component. Keep reading to find out all the benefits of adding it to your toolkit.
In this post, we are going to look at the high-level features and differences between the 2 tools. Let’s start with Salesforce Maps.
What is Salesforce Maps?
Salesforce Maps, formerly known as MapAnything, is a location-based intelligence tool that enables businesses to visualize their data geographically. It’s a native Salesforce app, meaning that instead of having to integrate with Salesforce using APIs, it’s an app that’s built 100% inside of Salesforce.
Salesforce Maps lives under the Sales Cloud umbrella and is designed to integrate with sales objects like Leads and Opportunities. What does this mean? It allows your field sales reps to recognize nearby leads, prospects, and opportunities so they can design routes to reach them efficiently and maximize their time in the field to get the most coverage out of their territories.
Salesforce Maps capabilities can be centered around 4 main categories:
- Data visualization: Since Salesforce Maps is built on the Salesforce platform, you can do more than just see your data. You can also interact with and update data as required.
- Territory planning: It enables you to determine how many sales reps are required in a given territory and exactly where they should be located to maximize sales resource capacity.
- Tracking real-time locations: You can track the location of delivery drivers, field workers, and any asset in your company.
- Route and schedule optimization: Salesforce Maps provides the most efficient way to go from one location to another. It also considers traffic.
Salesforce Maps allows you to build several types of layers, such as the following:
- Account
- Lead
- Opportunity
- Contact
For instance, you can use an account layer to visualize only accounts on the map. By defining the parameters of the layer, like accounts that are active, you can filter what you want to see.
Salesforce Maps also provides a dashboard with info all in one place, including the number of check-ins in a week, average time on site, the number of generated opportunities, and more.
In one sentence, Salesforce Maps is best for territory planning to help optimize sales processes and territory management.
What is Heat Map and what can you do with it?
Are you a telco, utilities, or energy company? Is your company’s infrastructure composed of underground pipes, wireless spectrum, cables, or any other physical network? Heat Map is specially designed for these types of industries.
Heat Map is like Salesforce Maps but with the addition of your company’s distribution network built in as an overlay within the application. All the network infrastructure is on the CRM.
With Heat Map you can:
- See which prospects are within the network (building resides completely within the company’s distribution network), co-located, or off-network.
- Focus on prospects that are closer to the company’s distribution network, so that they can be offered the best services and pricing
- View infrastructure and intelligently expand the network depending on the location of the off-network prospects
- Accelerate approval processes for new business cases to only days or weeks
- Bring sales, operations, engineering, finance, and project management together to easily engage multi-departmental and deal strategy
One of the greatest benefits of Heat Map is that it enables sales reps to go after businesses that are most likely to close a deal. For these types of companies, it’s a significant time and effort optimization.
Since Heat Map shows where the current infrastructure grid is, you can see which prospects are within the network, co-located, or off-network. Sales reps will be able to focus on on-net and co-located prospects so they can offer competitive pricing and have a better chance of winning new deals.
At the same time, it will be easier to intelligently expand the network depending on the location of the off-network prospects. For example: with Heat Map, you would be able to see that your company can offer services to 1,000 more businesses if the network is expanded 10-miles wider. Approval processes for new business cases, which usually take months or maybe even years, can significantly accelerate, maybe taking only days or weeks. All departments including sales, finance, engineering, and operations can benefit from it and the company can expand to areas that they know will bring great revenue.
How does Heat Map work?
Just as Salesforce Maps, with Heat Map you can also have layers. However, Heat Map provides a special and exclusive layer for the infrastructure or distribution network.
Heat Map Layers
Your company’s network infrastructure on Heat Map can be extremely useful for your sales team: Heat Map has a feature where you can pull a measurement tool to track distance between prospects or customers and your company infrastructure or distribution network.
Heat Map Measurement Tool
If you have, for example, 3 prospects or opportunities that might have some influence as to closing or moving to the next step of the cycle, you can use the map to visually see how you can negotiate pricing according to how close they are to your business infrastructure. Capturing new businesses will be easier.
Heat Map enables businesses to make decisions based on if the company has new prospects or opportunities that it can make sense to build new infrastructure in order to reach out those new prospects.
When it comes to decision-making within the business in itself, Heat Map does help companies make decisions that may have taken months and narrow it down to weeks or even days.
Enwave Energy Corporation: Heat Map Customer Story
Enwave Energy Corporation, the leading core-competency district energy operator in North America, needed an interactive map for customer development. They wanted to grow by expanding its infrastructure and reaching new territories.
Before Enwave was acquired by Brookfield for C$480 million in 2012, the Canadian company served a small number of hospitals, data centres, offices and residential buildings in downtown Toronto. After Enwave’s digital transformation, Brookfield was able to sell Enwave in 2021 for $4.1 billion.
App Solve was part of that digital transformation journey starting in 2017 by bringing Heat Map into a multi-site, multi-departmental Sales Cloud implementation that transformed Enwave’s business.
Watch Enwave’s customer story below.
Enwave is able to see prospects near their existing infrastructure, but who they have not yet approached for service. Heat Map facilitates Enwave’s lead generation and furthers important discussions with new building owners or managers.
Which mapping software tool is right for my business?
If your company has a distribution network, then Heat Map is the preferred option. If not, Salesforce Maps can be your mapping software candidate.
Although business owners might begin their search for digital mapping strategies with Salesforce Maps, some entrepreneurs go for Heat Map as their final option.
Heat Map provides distinctive and unique features that are particularly beneficial for companies with distribution networks or infrastructure that other map software solutions cannot provide.
App Solve has developed an innovative solution that is changing how companies with a distribution network run their business.
Have any inquiries about Heat Map for your specific business needs? Book a demo or contact our support team if you have any questions.
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