Empower your Clients

As a Salesforce consultant, you help clients to get more business by streamlining their operations.

In order to empower your clients with intelligent process automation, marketing and sales enablement, sales strategy and territory planning across different geographic areas, you need an innovative Salesforce application like the RealZips Global GeoData Platform. It’s a geo-location platform developed for Salesforce organizations, making it possible to connect faster with the right customers in the right locations. 

For many organizations, geographic management is a major effort . Trying to analyze who should manage leads, accounts and contacts, is a tremendous challenge for their business operations. Additionally, sales territory management becomes harder because of dynamic market conditions, change in headcount across sales teams, globalization, etc. This is where RealZips becomes  your true companion, making it possible to solve your clients’ headaches.

What is the RealZips App for Salesforce? 

The RealZips GeoData Platform is a Salesforce-native app that automatically structures and organizes customer data geographically. RealZips is often used for  enterprise territory management, data enhancement and workflow automation. 

Once the RealZips Salesforce app is deployed in  a client’s organization, all records will start linking to the respective zip or postal codes. You can set up multiple ownership assignment rules in the RealZips app in a matter of minutes.

Here are some of the typical use cases for the RealZips Salesforce platform:

• Automatic Geographic Data Structure: Organize customer records by relating to geographic data points in RealZips. It will help your client achieve marketing and sales success as their team members can effectively make better use of the available customer data. 
• Salesforce Record Ownership: The RealZips app lets you eliminate incorrect ownership assignments. Customer handovers and sales team collaboration can be vastly improved, which drives higher customer retention. 
• Global Territory Management: The RealZips Sales territory management app is powered by zip codes. It helps your clients integrate their Salesforce records with drive zones, deep market data, and geographic layers for effective territory management.
• Process Automation: RealZips allows your clients to target areas with the highest growth opportunities and best market conditions. This further helps you as a consultant to  automate your clients  business processes, enabling them to make informed decisions on where to promote, sell, and service. 
• Market Data Enhancement: The RealZips app allows for the addition of an unlimited amount of client-specific demographic, market or proprietary data.  The market data is used to describe your client’s market conditions, integrated with their existing customer data.
• Lead Assignment and Distance Zones: With RealZips, you can create distance zones for different locations and rank geographic areas according to market data and key metrics for any organization. Lead assignment rules can be created in less than 30 minutes. Distance zones around sales representatives will immediately make your clients’ CRM data actionable.  
• Marketing and Sales Enablement: The data-driven marketing and sales processes powered by RealZips help your team to focus on the areas with the highest market potential to connect with more potential customers. 
• Data Analytics & Reporting: You can implement global data analytics and reports by using RealZips app, leading to improved sales strategies and marketing activities, and business automation. 

How Can You Partner with RealZips? 

Being a Salesforce consultant, you always seek to offer the best possible solution. The RealZips team is here to help you drive success for your clients. Whenever you believe you have a use case for RealZips, simply request a discovery call with us.

What Type of Clients Will Benefit from RealZips ?

The RealZips GeoData Salesforce app is intuitively designed for Salesforce organizations with extensive customer records and related data. Companies with a lot of automation legacy, including process builders, workflows, and custom APEX, get instant value from the RealZips. You will be able to improve their automation framework, all while improving their data quality.  Furthermore, companies with operations in many countries or complex territories will find RealZips highly beneficial. 

What Kind of Results Should Your Clients Expect? 

The RealZips app can instantly be installed, configured and deployed. Your client’s data in Salesforce will most often be structured into geographical territories on the initial day.  However, it may take up to a few weeks if the Salesforce organization has very complex global territories. 

RealZips offers a business automation framework that includes deep market data and geographical global data analytics. Therefore – as a Salesforce Consultant – you have an opportunity to work closely with your client and add value to their business over time. 

What will the RealZips Team Bring to the Table?

The RealZips Inc. team has 30+ years of experience in global CRM implementations across various industries. As your trusted Salesforce partner, we look forward to supporting  you in solving use cases across your client base. Our team will work closely with you to help deliver the best possible results for your clients.

What Questions Should You Ask Your Clients?

To determine your clients need for RealZips, you can simply ask the following questions:

1. Is your Salesforce customer data missing important geographic data points and territory assignments?
2. Can your team analyze customer data using automatic geographic drill-downs across all customer data?
3. Are you facing challenges with lead routing due to complex rules and overlapping automation processes?
4. Are you struggling to run marketing campaigns based on travel distance, metropolitan areas, or counties?
5. Are your sales teams and channel partners aware of where to focus their sales efforts, based on market potential?
6. Do you find Salesforce Enterprise Territory Management rules and hierarchies difficult to manage?
7. Have you implemented territory management, powered by zip codes and descriptive geographic data?
8. How do you reconcile and ensure proper record ownership and record sharing?
9. Is there a lot of legacy automation to support Account Sharing and ownership rules?
10. Does your team have instant access to deep market data in Salesforce, to support daily activities?

We’re really excited to support some of the world’s best-known nonprofit organizations with our RealZips GeoData app for Salesforce!

Nonprofits are putting the RealZips app to use across four important areas:

1. Structure all data in Salesforce
2. Understand local demographics
3. Run campaigns for donations
4. Focus on communities in need

1. Structure all data in Salesforce

The RealZips app automatically enriches all records in Salesforce with geographic data. Nonprofits can structure millions of records by cities, counties, metropolitan areas, and their own regions.

As long as a record has a zip code, the RealZips app connects that record with powerful data about the zip code. All your data in Salesforce becomes geographically structured!

It’s absolutely amazing to see how more and more nonprofit teams become empowered to automatically divide all their donors by counties, and invite the them to local events!

The screenshot below shows a potential donor in zip code 10016. When the lead comes in through a web form, the geographic data points are automatically added. The lead is automatically assigned to the right contact person in the “New York Greater” office:

2. Understand local demographics

The RealZips app contains deep demographic data for every zip code across the United States. Nonprofits can use this rich data to better understand where they should ask for donations, and of course where there is a need for their volunteer work:

3. Run campaigns for donations

It takes seconds to find where in a city a nonprofit should focusing on getting donations; by running an instant report over zip codes with a high average income:

The nonprofit team can very quickly run campaigns in the areas where they can expect donations from, selecting potential donors that live in these zip codes:

4. Focus on communities in need

When the nonprofit has built up a base of donations and volunteers, they use RealZips to pinpoint where in their city there is a great need for their help.

The team can run instant reports, pinpointing areas with many kids in low income areas. They select zip codes and track their progress in these zip codes over time, such as number of volunteer hours going into each area:

We couldn’t be more excited, seeing our RealZips app being used to provide help for people in need!

We are Salesforce Guys, just like you

Every day, I struggled with ownership issues in Salesforce

As sales reps joined or left our team — I was always behind — trying to figure out who should own leads, accounts, and contacts.

When territory borders changed, the problem became much worse. It took months to transfer ownership of thousands of records, not to mention editing lead assignment rules and adjusting account sharing rules.

Other Salesforce Admins kept asking: “Isn’t there a better way?”

Since so many of us live with the same challenges, it made sense trying to solve the territory management problems once and for all.

I spent over two years building the RealZips app, with the intent to fix all our territory headaches. It was a painstaking experience, but my fellow Admins kept pushing me forward.

When Salesforce Admins set up RealZips, this is what will happen

• The native app adds zip codes and market potential to Salesforce
• Each zip code has 50 geographic data points, including sales territories
• All existing records are automatically linked to their zip code
• CRM data is structured by territories, counties, time zones & more
• Setting up lead assignment becomes a matter of minutes, not weeks
• Reassigning ownership can take 30 minutes, as opposed to a month

Empower your sales team with “3x Right”

Salesforce Admins love to show me how they now focus efforts on enabling their sales teams to win more opportunities, guiding sales to:

• Focus on the right place
• Meet with the right customer
• Pick the right time

Bad data is the #1 productivity killer when using CRM systems. The problem can be solved by structuring your data in Salesforce.com.

Remember years ago when your computer was slowing to a crawl? Recall technically savvy friends giving you 7-step instructions on how to “defrag” your hard drive?

Data problem yesterday: Hard Drive Fragmentation

In the past people kept saving tons of files to their PCs hard drive. When the hard drive filled up, large files could no longer be saved in one single place. Instead, your computer stored fragments of large files in many different places. This was called fragmentation.

You could actually hear a hard drive jumping from place to place trying to pull a file together. The problem was solved with clever software, that organized your hard drive automatically by moving files around so the big files could be stored in one place. When the “defrag” was done, the response time of your computer would improve and you could get your work done faster.

Data problem today: CRM Data Fragmentation

In today’s more advanced technological world, our data is stored in the cloud and most people think they don’t need to worry about defragmenting their data anymore. This is, however, far from the truth.

As everyone using the most popular CRM system in the world, Salesforce.com, keeps adding data to their system every day. This creates a very similar problem – data fragmentation. The more data your team adds, the more fragmented and disorganized your customer data will become.

To give you some examples, someone might import 25,000 leads from an Excel file. The invoice system adds 7,000 customers while duplicating existing data in Salesforce. Before the day is over, another person might add the same customer record five times (true story).

How data fragmentation hurts sales

Let’s say you’re going to Fort Lauderdale to visit some of your customers. When you try searching “Fort Lauderdale” in Salesforce.com, you must type in different spellings such as “Ft. Lauderdale”, “Fort Laderdale” and “Ft Lauderdale” just to find your customers in the system.

You must also need to search in surrounding towns like Hollywood, Dania Beach, Plantation, and Oakland Park. These cities are all in Broward County. If you can’t search across a county or metropolitan area, you’re walking right past many sales opportunities.

Missing millions of dollars in revenue

Take the simple challenge of visiting customers in the Fort Lauderdale area and multiply that across everyone in your company, across all territories, cities and metropolitan areas:

• Can your marketing team effectively invite customers to local events?
• How can sales teams be truly effective while visiting customers in the field?
• Can finance teams run sales reports across states, counties, and metropolitan areas?
• Does sales management know if customer records are owned by the right people?

Defrag data in Salesforce.com

The solution to the problem is simple, all your data in Salesforce must be “defragged”. Every customer record must be associated with a zip code, city, county, metropolitan area, plus the right sales territory and sales region. When your customer records drop into the matrix of a complete geographical data structure, all customer data will immediately become useful.

Defragmenting data in Salesforce is an automatic process that works much like the software that structured your hard drive. The RealZips app will do the job for you, automatically matching customer records to zip codes and creating a complete geographic data matrix.

Get back to connecting with customers

When the RealZips GeoData is in place, your customer data in Salesforce.com can be put to use like never before:

• Sales can search customers across cities and counties, planning effective field trips.
• Marketing can run campaigns across any geographic area with great efficiency.
• Everyone searching for customer data and running reports will no longer be frustrated.
• Data analytics will be fun, immediately finding new business opportunities to call on.

Salesforce recently upgraded the native territory management module to Territory Management 2.0.

Territory Management 2.0 lets you build sales hierarchies and assign access to Accounts across your whole sales team. Over the years, we have learned that access to Accounts must be set up right to drive collaboration across sales teams and ultimately sales success.

However, matching customer Accounts to territories is always a challenge:

• How do you assign all Accounts in “New England” to the New England Director of Sales?
• How can Accounts in Greater San Diego and surrounding cities (La Jolla, Coronado, Mission Valley, etc.) automatically be assigned to the “San Diego Territory”?
• How do you assign all Accounts across New York Metropolitan area to an Key Account Manager for “NY Metro”?

By combining the RealZips with Territory Management 2.0 you can solve these challenges listed above. Everyone in your company will be able to check if all Accounts are assigned to the right salesperson. Learn how to use RealZips in Salesforce Territory Management, by reviewing this help post.

Most organizations struggle to match CRM data with the right sales person.

The effort to continuously align your company’s customer data in Salesforce with the right sales people is overwhelming and costly. Most organizations have a lot of customer records owned by the wrong sales person. Many of us have seen what this causes:

• Commissions are paid to the wrong sales people.
• Sales people do not meet their quotas.
• Customers are not being called on by the right people.
• Sales teams can not get a true overview of their customers.
• Mailers are sent out with the wrong sales person’s name listed.

We built RealZips to make it possible for companies to instantly align all their Salesforce CRM data with the right sales person. The current challenge around ownership can within days be turned into an opportunity to drive even greater sales success.

Solving ownership challenges permanently.

Oftentimes, we found ourselves having to align thousands of customer records with the right owner. This challenge turned into the reason for building RealZips. By now, we love hearing the excitement from customers, as they align ownership and set themselves up for sales success. We still find find it amazing to learn how our customers keep all their CRM data aligned over time:

Calculate your risk. Then solve your ownership challenges once and for all.

Calculate how much time your team can save by using our app. Find out how to minimize legal risk for everyone and drive success for your sales team.

Put our ROI Calculator to use.

• Fill in the yellow boxes with your organization’s ballpark values.
• Estimate the risk of revenue being assigned to the wrong person.
• Identify your current risk of commissions being paid out incorrectly.
• Calculate how much time your team can save with RealZips.

When all CRM data in Salesforce is owned by the right person or sales team, both marketing and sales can operate more effectively. The benefits of having CRM data matched with your sales people spans across all internal and external stakeholders.

My first job was selling computer systems. I was 19 years old and it was an easy job at first. As more salespeople joined, we had to continuously change sales territories. As the company continued to grow, matters related to sales territories became increasingly complicated.

Being part of a growing sales team, there were many things that kept us awake at night. Are sales territories planned to give us all the same potential? Do other salespeople own customers inside my territory? Am I getting the right commission payout? What are my colleagues’ territory borders?

Ever since my first job, these questions turned out to be similar across most sales teams that grow or change over time. We figured there must be a better way to manage territories.
What if we build an app for Salesforce.com that will

• Use zip codes as the base for sales territories.
• Connect zip codes to all existing CRM data in Salesforce.
• Allow one sales rep or many reps to own each zip code.
• The territory information is then shared across the organization.

Every zip code should be available inside your CRM system. Each zip code should have information related to all sales territory information. Here’s an example of territory information for zip code 10019 in New York:

With the app we built,  it is now possible to empower the sales team to drive their success. By making all territory-related information available to everyone in the organization, issues regarding to territory borders becomes a thing of the past. The Salesforce Administrator can add as many salespeople to each zip code as needed, in case your organization operates in for example industry verticals. Resellers, stores and partners can be added to each zip code in the RealZips app.

Sharing territory information for success

When your organization openly shares territory changes, it creates full transparency and reasons to collaborate across the team. The end goal is to connect faster with your customers, which drives success both for customers and your team.

As market conditions change, sales territories must change to better serve customers and balance potential across the territories. Sales territory changes create complexity for the sales team, as territory borders are moved and customers change hands.

By simply tracking all territory changes with full transparency in Salesforce.com, the uncertainty related to territory changes is a thing of the past:

By using our app in your Salesforce CRM system, your team will be empowered to faster connect the right salesperson with the right customer. Uncertainty around sales territories will no longer hold back the team. Instead, everyone has information on sales territories to drive both individual and team sales goals.

Customer feedback

For the team behind the app, it’s a truly exciting journey to help our customers be even more successful. People using RealZips are telling us:

• Everyone can quickly reference the sales team members in every zip code, city, county, metropolitan area, state and sales territory.
• At trade shows we can instantly tell prospects who their sales person is.
• Territory changes can be viewed by everyone, clearing up challenges related to ownership of customers, quota attainment, and commission payouts.

After 25 years of developing and running CRM systems, every organization we meet has the same question:

The sales and marketing teams can’t find their own data. How do we fix it?
If your team can’t search customers and analyze data, many things happen:

• Duplicate records are added, making it even harder to find data.
• Sales can’t find customers in the CRM system while traveling in the field.
• Marketing can’t effectively target cities, counties or metropolitan areas.
• The team’s trust in your organization’s data goes down.
• Overall usefulness of your CRM data is questioned.

We have witnessed numerous times how this scenario plays out. We kept thinking there must be a better way. What if we added Geographic Data to your CRM data?

What is GeoData?

Geographic Data (GeoData) is geographic data points of many types that enrich your customer data. Samples of GeoData are zip code validation, city and county names, metropolitan areas and time zones. GeoData also adds demographics, federal regions, your organization’s complete sales territory information and more.

Why everyone needs GeoData

Search for “Fort Lauderdale” in your CRM system. Then, try to find all customers in that city by searching for “Ft Lauderdale.” Most likely you won’t find many until you also search for misspellings such as “Ft. Lauderdale” and “Fort Laderdale.”

Next, you want to reach out to customers in towns near Ft. Lauderdale. Include the neighboring town “Hollywood” in your search. Now, your result will likely include customers in many other states:

How GeoData empowers your team

With all your CRM data enriched with GeoData, a search for “Fort Lauderdale” would uncover all the right customers immediately. If you need to include surrounding cities, simply search for the county “Broward FL.”

Within seconds, you can view customers in the cities near Fort Lauderdale:

How GeoData drives sales success

The reasons to enrich CRM Data with GeoData are compelling:

• Adding GeoData is a very quick process, providing a fast ROI.
• Your CRM data will have a robust and useful geographic structure.
• Searches, reporting and analysis will be very powerful for everyone.

Your entire organization will be able to do new things:

• Search customer data across zip codes, cities, counties, metropolitan areas, sales territories, sales regions, time zones and federal regions.
• Match up areas with great business potential against your lead data.
• Your team will gain trust in their CRM data.

GeoData is intended to drive success by identifying and targeting the right customers, which will enable your team to close more deals.

Sample Salesforce Lead record enriched with GeoData

Salesforce records can be enriched with any type of GeoData. In the sample below, a Lead has been enriched with city, county, time zone, owner matching and more:

Having worked with CRM systems for 25 years, the challenge was always the same:

“We must align ownership of customer data, to match up with sales territories”

Aligning ownership is a moving target that’s impossible to keep up with. Sales territory borders change, salespeople get new jobs, not to mention customers moving to new cities.

The effort involved in trying to keep ownership aligned is overwhelming and costly. If your organization does in fact have customer records owned by the wrong salesperson, most of us know what happens:

• Commissions are paid to the wrong sales people.
• Sales people do not meet their quotas.
• Customers are not being called on properly.
• Sales people can’t get a true overview of their own customers.
• Mailers are sent out, with the wrong sales peoples’ names listed.

Seeing all this happen in front of our eyes, we knew there had to be a better way.
Imagine being able to see if a record has the wrong owner:

We understood that having capability to align ownership across data in Salesforce.com would have a fundamental impact for most organizations:

• The sales team can immediately spot and correct mistakes.
• The Salesforce Admin is empowered to transfer thousands of records in minutes.
• Your whole team’s trust in your company’s data would improve.
• Your company would be able to connect faster and deeper with customers

Helping teams solve these challenges

After living with these pain-points ourselves for many years, It is now truly exciting to solve these challenges and empower our customers’ entire organizations with our app.

The best part is when our customers call us and letting us know they’re saving 100+ hours  in less than 60 minutes. We never get tired of listening to our customers, as they’re telling us how much they love to be able to align ownership across their CRM data.