Cooper Equipment Rentals Ditches the Guesswork: Map-Driven Field Sales in Dynamics 365

A quick sense of scale first.

Canada is the second-largest country on the planet by land area, nearly 10 million square kilometres, bordering three oceans. What counts as a routine cross-border trip in Europe is, for most Canadians, an unremarkable weekend drive. Ask someone there what a "short drive" means, and the answer often stretches further than you'd expect anywhere else.

Now imagine being a field rep inside that scale, selling for the country's biggest name in construction equipment rentals. Your territory isn't a neighbourhood or a city. It could be an entire province. You're juggling active job sites, prospects scattered across industrial zones, and rental equipment that's constantly on the move. Your CRM holds thousands of records, but until fairly recently, every single one was just another entry in a list, with zero indication of how far apart any of it actually sat.

That was life at Cooper Equipment Rentals before Maplytics entered the picture.

Key Takeaways

• A list shows you what's in your CRM. A map integration for Dynamics 365 shows you where it sits, and what to do about it.
• An early finish or a cancelled meeting doesn't have to mean wasted time once maps in Dynamics 365 surface nearby opportunities instantly.
• Route optimization in Dynamics CRM, Radius or Proximity Search, and Along the Route turn a rep's day from reactive to deliberate, driving stronger sales route optimization in Dynamics 365.
• Heat Maps, running on that same Dynamics 365 map layer, give leadership a territory-wide strategic view that supports territory management in Dynamics 365, something no single rep's dashboard could ever provide alone.

A CRM Full of Records, None of Them Mapped

Cooper Equipment Rentals operates 80 branches nationwide, supplying everything from excavators and aerial lifts to generators, climate control units, and trench safety gear. If a job site needs it, Cooper likely has it in stock.

Serving that kind of footprint puts their sales team in one of the toughest logistical positions in the industry. Yet for years, their CRM, loaded with accounts, opportunities, live job sites, and prospects, had no geographic layer at all. Just a very long list.

Planning a day's route meant treating that list like a road atlas built out of a spreadsheet. Manually cross-checking addresses, estimating drive times, and eventually just going with instinct, visiting the customer who came to mind first, not necessarily the one who was actually closest.

Worse, any time freed up by a cancelled appointment or an early wrap-up went unused. With no fast way to spot nearby options, reps simply pushed on to their next scheduled stop, even if two or three worthwhile, overlooked prospects were sitting minutes away.

From a Flat List to a Living Map

Once Cooper linked Maplytics to their existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 setup, the shift was immediate. Every job site, account, prospect, and active rental in the CRM turned into a pin on a live, interactive map, viewable inside the same system reps already used every day.

No new platform to learn, or exporting data elsewhere, or extra login. The map simply became part of the CRM experience already in place.

A list that once told them nothing about location became a map that told them everything at a glance. Color-coded pins separated active customers from prospects, rental sites from job sites, and priority accounts from ones that had gone quiet. A full picture of the territory, previously something only a rep carried around in their head, was suddenly available to the entire team.

What Changed on the Ground

Route Optimization did away with the habit of tackling appointments in whatever order they happened to appear on the calendar. Stops are now sequenced automatically into the most efficient path, with less time circling back and more time actually with customers.

Proximity Search turned dead time into opportunity. A cancelled meeting or an early finish no longer means an empty gap. Reps can instantly pull up every nearby account, prospect, or job site within a chosen radius and fill that window productively.

Along the Route made the drive between two confirmed stops genuinely useful. Prospects and accounts sitting close to the planned path surface automatically, letting a rep squeeze in an extra visit without meaningfully extending the day.

Save Route meant reps revisiting the same group of contractors week after week no longer had to rebuild their plan from scratch each time; set it once, save it, and reuse it, the same way you'd reuse a favourite playlist.

Heat Map Visualization gave Cooper's managers a way to step back from any single rep's day-to-day route and view the bigger picture: where customer density clusters, where coverage is thin, where a new branch could make sense, and whether time in the field actually matches where the real opportunity is.

The Payoff for Cooper

• Squeezing more customer visits into each day
• Reduced fuel spend
• Fewer unproductive gaps between stops
• Sharper, data-driven calls on where to expand next
• A sales team working off one shared, live view of the territory, not a patchwork of individual mental maps that go stale the moment someone changes routes

For a company running 80 branches across a country the size of Canada, this isn't a small tweak. It's the line between field operations that can actually scale and ones that eventually buckle once the CRM's list view becomes too unwieldy to be useful.

The full story, with more detail on how each feature fits into Cooper's daily operations, direct input from the team, and a look at it running live inside Dynamics 365, is worth the extra read.

There's something almost obvious in hindsight about how a national rental company solved a problem this large just by giving their CRM a map. It's the kind of case study that makes you look back at your own list view and ask an uncomfortable question:

Why is this still just a list?

Read the full Cooper Equipment Rentals success story here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: Does Dynamics 365 support integration with Google Maps? 

Yes. Maplytics brings Google Maps, Bing Maps, Azure Maps, or Mapbox integration into Dynamics 365, so teams can plot CRM records, plan routes, and send directions to their preferred provider, without being locked into just one.

Q2: What's the way to view Dynamics CRM records on a map?

Maplytics takes records, accounts, leads, opportunities, and more, straight out of Dynamics 365 and plots them on an interactive map, replacing static list views with a geographic one.

Q3: Can Dynamics 365 work with Azure Maps specifically?

Yes. Maplytics integrates Azure Maps into Dynamics 365, letting organizations visualize data, run searches, and plan routes on Microsoft's own map infrastructure, a fit for teams already standardized on Azure.

Q4: How does Dynamics CRM handle route optimization? 

Through Maplytics, users set an origin, destination, and waypoints, then optimize by shortest time, shortest distance, or direction, with the option to avoid tolls, highways, or traffic.

Q5: Can route optimization be applied to territory-based sales planning? 

Yes. It clusters appointments by geography so reps can build efficient multi-stop routes inside their assigned territory, rather than doubling back across it, cutting both mileage and drive time.

Q6: How does Dynamics 365 handle territory management visually? 

Maplytics allows managers to draw, adjust, and assign territories directly on a map, then plot accounts within each one to identify coverage gaps or overlapping assignments.

Q7: Is territory mapping built into Dynamics 365 natively? 

No, it isn't included out of the box. Maplytics adds this capability, letting territories be created, saved, and reused within the existing Dynamics 365 environment.

Q8: Can several appointments in one day be combined into a single route? 

Yes. Maplytics sequences multiple stops into one optimized route, complete with turn-by-turn directions, estimated travel time, and distance between each leg.

Q9: Is there a way to browse records like leads and accounts geographically? 

Yes. Maplytics offers a map-based view of leads, accounts, opportunities, and other records, with search, filtering, and the ability to open full record details straight from the map.

Q10: What separates basic map integration from full route mapping in Dynamics CRM? 

Basic map integration just places CRM records on a map by location. Route mapping builds on that by sequencing those records into a complete, navigable route, with waypoints, travel preferences, and one-click export to apps like Google Maps or Waze.

Take It Further

Maplytics, with its AI assistant, MapCopilot, adapts to the shape of your business. Whether your mapping needs run on Bing Maps, Azure Maps, Google Maps, Apple Maps, or ESRI ArcGIS, Maplytics makes the integration inside Dynamics 365 feel seamless, from Radius Search and Route Mapping to Territory Management and Heat Map analysis, etc. To experience it first-hand, you can have a 15-day free trial or get a personalised demo inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Power Apps, Power Pages, or Dataverse. Get in touch at [email protected], or explore more at the Website and Microsoft Marketplace.