Mapadore: Helping to optimize sales team productivity with accurate, real-time location data

The “traveling salesman problem” has been intriguing computer scientists for decades: how do you find the shortest (and most cost-effective) way from A to B? While route optimization poses interesting theoretical questions, it’s a very practical consideration for businesses who have a lot of staff on the road. Convenient, well-planned journeys not only improve efficiency, they also save costs and limit environmental impact.

That’s the idea behind the Italian startup Mapadore: “Our clients include energy, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and real estate companies. On any given day, a real estate agent can have one appointment in the north of Milan, another in the south of Milan, and a third five miles outside the city. Our technologies help sales and maintenance teams optimize their schedules, spend less time on the road and ultimately, make more sales,” says Fabrizio Bosio, Mapadore’s Co-founder and CEO.

Founded in late 2016, Mapadore uses Google Maps Platform to enrich sales development applications with highly-accurate, real-time location data that enable its customers to optimize business and sales processes and close more deals in less time.

Helping sales reps get where they need to go in less time

“Our mission is to enable companies to improve their processes and help sales teams work smarter,” Fabrizio explains. “By harnessing Google Maps Platform, we have the data we need to suggest the best time slots, schedule and routes and help reps to get to clients faster and more efficiently.” In practical terms, this means less time spent traveling and more time connecting with prospects and closing sales.

“Some of our clients have teams of more than 100 sales agents,” shares Fabrizio. “By optimizing their routes, each rep can fit in one more appointment per day. That’s 20,000 more meetings per year, and a lot more sales potential.” To make this possible, Mapadore worked with Google Cloud Premier Partner Web Geo Services to integrate Google Maps Platform APIs such as the Distance Matrix API and Directions API to optimize travel distances and times and recommend the most efficient routes between start and end points, while the Maps JavaScript API and Geocoding API give sales managers a comprehensive overview of their teams’ sales activities at any given time. “By providing sales teams with efficient route suggestions, the Distance Matrix API allows us to help our clients boost productivity and save up to 50% in business costs,” Fabrizio explains.

Originally founded in Italy, Mapadore now has active users in 30 countries across the world. “We build our applications with our customers’ specific needs in mind,” Fabrizio says “Though that can be a challenge as our client base is very diverse. Four years down the road, we work with all sorts of businesses, from one-man operations to large multinationals.”

Enabling sales reps to focus on customers, not logistics

“Our goal is to simplify, optimize, and improve a range of business and sales processes for our customers,” Fabrizio says “We’ve integrated features that support the lead management process, for example, enabling sales reps to prioritize meetings that have a higher probability of ending in a sale.” Mapadore has found that by using its applications, clients effectively cut the time between first contact and closing a deal by half.

For one of its clients, which has a conversion rate of 7%, the priority was scheduling as many appointments with potential customers as possible. Before integrating Mapadore, the client’s call center agents were spending 6 to 7 minutes qualifying each customer and trying to locate the closest available sales reps. Today with Mapadore, the whole process takes 30 seconds, which has enabled the client to increase its number of appointments by 5%. “An increase of 5% may not sound like much,” Fabrizio says, “until you take into account that it means seven new clients per month, and that each new customer spends around $12,000. It’s a significant increase in profits.”

Supporting scalability and future growth

As a small team of just nine employees, Mapadore has a very flat hierarchy, with everyone contributing their ideas for new products and features. “We use Google products throughout the company,” shares Fabrizio, “and being able to build and deploy applications within a unified platform such as Google App Engine really makes things easier for our developers and our team. It’s a very powerful platform that allows us to access all APIs in one place and easily quantify requests and estimate costs.”

”Google Maps Platform offers us three things: performance, scalability, and reliability,” he continues. “This makes us much more confident in our ability to develop new projects and continue to scale our existing products. What’s more, we value not having to manage backups, redundancy, or multiple environments - things we’ve all had to deal with in the past.”

The Mapadore team is looking forward to continuing its partnership with Google Premier Partner Web Geo Services to develop future geolocation products based on Google Maps Platform APIs. While Mapadore currently develops its applications in-house, the team is considering working with third party partners to build high-value services based on Mapadore algorithms and Google infrastructure. In particular, Fabrizio and his team are exploring Google Cloud solutions in the areas of AI and Machine Learning, API Management, and containers.

“One of our projects for 2021 is to create a Mapadore partners network bringing together companies who use our technologies,” Fabrizio shares. “We’re not interested in becoming a huge company with hundreds of employees: what counts for us is being able to support our customers in the best way we can.”