If you are running a business with multiple sites or a mobile sales force, you probably spend a lot of time looking at your revenue. But knowing where your money comes from today is only half the battle. The real winners are the ones who know exactly where the money could be coming from tomorrow. That is where market value mapping comes into play. It is a way of looking at a map and seeing pounds and pence instead of just postcodes.
At Atlas Mapping, we see plenty of companies that are doing okay but could be doing brilliantly if they just shifted their focus slightly. Usually, they are chasing every lead that comes in without checking if it is actually worth the effort.
Most managers divide up their territories by looking at historical sales. They think if a rep did well in Bristol last year, then Bristol is a high-value area but that is a bit backwards. What if that rep only scratched the surface? or what if the market in Bristol is actually shrinking?
Market value mapping is about looking at the external data. You want to know the total "spend" available in a certain area for what you sell. If you are selling high-end kitchen fit-outs, you don't just want to see where people live, you want to focus on household characteristics. You want to see where people with a specific household income and a certain house type live. When you plot that value on a map, you might find that a small suburb you ignored is actually worth more than a whole city centre.
Your competitors are probably looking at the same basic maps you are. They are probably all fighting over the same high-street spots or the same big industrial estates but when you use a more nuanced approach, you start to see the gaps they have left behind.
We use our Vision software to help businesses layer different datasets. It might be census data, business counts, or even footfall patterns. When you stack these up, you get a much clearer picture of where the "low-hanging fruit" is. It is about being smarter, not just louder. If you can see that a competitor is over-serving one area but completely ignoring another with similar demographics, that is your cue to move in but you can only do that if you have done your market value mapping properly first.
We think one of the hardest things for a sales manager to do is tell a rep to ignore a certain lead but time is the only thing you can't get more of. If your team is spending 20% of their week driving to a remote area for a client that only spends £500 a year, they are losing you money.
A high-performing business uses geography to filter their efforts. You can use the data to rank your territories by their total potential value. This helps you decide where to put your best people. It also helps you decide where you might just want to use a digital-only approach. It is about efficiency and let’s be honest, no one wants to spend their life on the motorway for a lead that isn't going anywhere. At Atlas Mapping, we help you see those "dead zones" clearly so you can avoid them.
If you give two reps territories with the same number of people, but one area has a total market value of £1m and the other has £10m, you have already failed. The rep in the £10m area will hit their target by accident, while the other person will struggle no matter how hard they work. That is a recipe for a toxic culture and high staff turnover.
Using market value mapping allows you to balance territories based on opportunity rather than just size or headcount. It makes things fair. When everyone has a similar "pot" to work from, you can actually see who the best salespeople are. It helps take the guesswork out of performance reviews. and it makes your forecasts a lot more accurate because they are based on what is actually out there in the real world.
We often talk about how maps bring logic to a business. Spreadsheets are great for accounting, but they are not as good for strategy because they don't show you proximity. They don't show you how a new housing estate in one county might affect your branch in the next county over.
When you put your data into a visual format, you start to see trends that were hidden in the rows and columns. Maybe your best customers all live within a 20-minute drive of a specific motorway junction or maybe you notice that your sales drop off the moment you cross a certain river. These are the things that help you outperform the competition. They are small insights that lead to big wins.
You don't need to be a data scientist to get this right. We have built our tools to be easy to use because we know you have a business to run. Whether you want to use our Vision software to do the heavy lifting yourself or you want us to provide a full market value mapping report, we can help.
If your current strategy feels like it is based on a bit of a hunch, maybe it is time to put some data behind it. It is a lot easier to beat the competition when you can see exactly where they are weak and where you are strong.
Most of all it is about giving you the edge. The market is crowded and everyone is looking for an advantage. Using geography is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but with modern data, it is more powerful than ever. Contact us today by completing our online contact form if you want to see how your own business looks when you map out its true value. We are always happy to have a look and tell you what we see.