Salesforce acquired MapAnything for exactly that reason, to extend the power of sales and service professionals with our market-leading location intelligence solutions. Today, MapAnything becomes Salesforce Maps. It’s the perfect marriage of advanced geo-spatial capabilities and ease-of-use we’ve all come to expect from Salesforce. The result is a location-aware CRM connecting your mobile employees to their work, enabling higher revenue performance, and better customer experiences throughout the journey. Here are three ways location intelligence is changing how we work:

1. Transform the customer-buying experience 

Customer experience is rapidly overtaking price as the key brand differentiator. 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services – up from 80% in 2018. Moreover, 73% of customers say one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies. That means that one standout experience holds other companies to a higher standard — and customers are free to take their business elsewhere if they’re not receiving the experience they expect.

How Salesforce Maps can help: 

Salesforce Maps addresses this reality head-on. The tool provides a location-based view of critical customer data easily accessible from mobile or desktop, empowering reps to cut down on time spent planning and more time building meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers face-to-face.

Field sellers now have a clearer picture into their territory. A rep can now log into CRM to visualize their territory using live data like opportunity size; Einstein’s predicted likelihood that a lead converts or a deal closes; or last-visit data to prioritize their travel. By utilizing traffic data, reps can fill their schedule to make the most of their time in the field while leaving enough time for them to make the big meeting. For service organizations, accessing live technician locations allows them to notify customers of their anticipated arrival time, removing the frustration we all feel when waiting for a repair person to arrive. 

2. Connected data accessible from anywhere

It’s a known truth that as new generations enter the workforce, they bring higher expectations of the tools they use with them. They expect streamlined, intuitive, all-in-one solutions like those on their iPhone. But some recent data from Deloitte Digital shows that these employees are in for a rude awakening as the number of systems they must access as part of their jobs has recently risen from eight to 11. This reality is worse for salespeople, who spend over 66% of their time on tasks other than selling.

How Salesforce Maps can help:

Salesforce Mobile with Salesforce Maps is as easy to use as Yelp or Uber. We’re envisioning technology that goes beyond, “Help me find a nearby coffee shop,” to “Show me nearby customers that I haven’t visited this quarter, and route me to three nearby leads with my two hours of free time in the afternoon.” When CRM is as easy to use as an iPhone, workforce productivity improves dramatically.

3. Make sense of big data 

As Forrester writes in Now Tech: Location Intelligence Technologies, one of the core benefits of location intelligence is to democratize spatial insights for the business user. Providing rich context to the field is one way Michelin, a leading tire manufacturer, is using Salesforce Maps to help sales reps connect with their customers.

“We now have an even clearer, single view of our sales reps, and we’ve been able to decommission two to three tools since this acquisition. Reps don’t have to jump off Salesforce either. They can click right into Maps right from Salesforce and access everything they need while on the road,” says Mike Coutts, Product Owner for Salesforce Sales Cloud at Michelin. “Our reps are looking for key visual insights. They want their data to come alive, and in picture format on their phones to help them make a decision.”

How Salesforce Maps can help:

Maps is more than just a tool to help a rep boost sales productivity. It extends intelligent decision making, from the sales rep, to the head of Sales, and into the office of the CFO. Many of the world's leading sales organizations struggle with sales rep retention, with 45% of sales organizations reporting turnover of higher than 30%. By intelligently creating sales territories that give all reps an equal shot at making their number, Maps Territory Planning helps customers create balanced sales territories giving sales reps a more equal chance of hitting their number.

Location intelligence and the future of work

Artificial intelligence use amongst sales teams is forecasted to grow 155% between 2018-2020, and 84% of service decision makers cite improved or expanded mobile service offerings and operations as a priority. The future of sales and service is rooted in intelligent mobile work. Location intelligence and Salesforce Maps will be one of the key levers for organizations to pull as they transform their businesses to adapt to the new customer engagement environment. 

To learn more about Salesforce Maps, visit our product page on Salesforce.com