Mobile mapping helps field reps close more business using Microsoft Dynamics CRM

About four years ago, Kerr Dental, the Dental Division of Danaher Corp., was looking for a way to enable its field sales representatives to more efficiently use the massive amount of data stored in its Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.

The combined challenge was to help the field sales team increase their interactions with customers, uncover the best opportunities in an area, and improve the reps' adoption of Dynamics CRM, says Ken Buck, regional sales manager at Kerr.

The need: Access to more intuitive CRM data

At that time, Kerr Dental used the CWR CRM Mobile app from a third-party provider. But Kerr needed a way to enable its outside sales reps to identify additional sales opportunities that were in proximity to sales calls that they were making. Although Kerr always had accessibility to such data through Dynamics CRM, it wasn't accessible in a way that was efficient for the sales reps.

"It would be nice if they could see how close those opportunities were on a map," Buck says. "We tried to use Google Maps to find the locations of particular doctors on their lists but it wasn't very efficient or a good use of a sales rep's time."

Then Kerr came across a platform called BatchGEO that allowed the reps to create maps of doctors' locations from their Excel spreadsheet data, he says.

"That was good, but because the data we had was not always up to date, we had to go in every week or every other week and create new lists [of doctors' offices]," Buck says. "And there were limits on how many data points you could plot and ...