Mobile Maps: Find My Next Nearby Visit

Mobile maps was my pick, and yes, you two are starting to know me too well. Per the panel it's in private beta, exclusively for HubSpot mobile app customers on all Enterprise tiers, iOS and Android. You explore around your current GPS location or search for an address, browse records sorted by distance, and get directions to your next visit.

Here is why it landed for me: “I remember my days of being a road warrior, having a lot of windshield time, driving around to a bunch of appointments in some city in the U.S., and whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Accident, traffic, just missed this meeting. What can I do to fill in the time, or this person canceled on me or rescheduled.” Being able to ask who else is in the area, and to segment them a little, is the useful part. Reps have long wanted map functionality on the mobile app, and the harder problem in the field is getting them to log new information, not look up what's already there. “So this doesn't solve that problem,” but it helps with the other one.

The caution is the data. “If you don't have addresses on company records, this doesn't work.” And “if you don't have your lifecycle stages sorted out and cleaned up and automated, so you can quickly see who are my customers, who is an opportunity… along with just a whole bunch of other data that you can use to determine who would be a good person to visit now.” You could pull up a whole map of potentials, but only a small percentage make sense to visit today, based on where they are.

That is the part I'd press on: “Nobody wants a salesperson showing up just to go waste their time.” The “I was in the area, I figured I'd pop in on my milk run” visit earns a short, rude reply and the question, “What value are you adding?” The visit that works is the one with a reason: “I have never met your leadership team, and I think that would help to solidify the relationship and talk about any questions that you guys have in person to push this thing across the finish line.” Sure, go do it.

Chris came at it from the add-on map tools. Having set up Map My Customers and others, he finds it hard to define where the work is being done, because you need so much context on the map. His idea, and it's his idea, not something the panel states, was to screenshot the map and bring it to a Breeze conversation to ask where he's supposed to go right now. In his words, “the only thing missing from that screenshot is the Breeze button.” The panel says nothing about Breeze.

Chris added that if you still rely on the domain name to decide what the address is and haven't worked out parent-child company relationships, you probably won't see the locations you want, because all you have is the corporate address. The same goes if you've leaned on HubSpot enrichment based on domain. And that's assuming you even have domain names in there. Chris also noted that HubSpot already has a map view for objects with addresses in the CRM index, next to the calendar view and the Gantt chart for projects, so mobile is a natural next place for it.

What to do: this is a private beta for Enterprise mobile app customers only. If you're on Enterprise with reps who travel, check company addresses and lifecycle stages first, and the parent-child question if your accounts have several locations. If you aren't on Enterprise or nobody leaves the building, skip it.