Eureka - The power of your own data

In our experience most businesses collect more data about their activities, customers, opportunities and shortcomings than they have time to interpret. The challenge for many lies in gaining a complete picture of what their data is telling them – specifically in visualising the geography of their business. For many, this information is already available, and the tendency to purchase external data to tell them something they can find out for themselves is often the last thing they need to do.

Geoplan experience this regularly with clients who, viewing their business activities set out on a map for the first time, experience everything from a ‘lightbulb’ going on to a genuine ‘Eureka!’ moment where trends become clear, and where they can suddenly see new opportunities and threats and begin to implement necessary changes or carry on with more of the same with a greater degree of confidence dependent on the results.

Painting the Picture

The ‘Eureka!’ moment encapsulates one of the key benefits of visualising your market using the postcode system as the backdrop. It helps to reveal a significant range of insight, and whilst spreadsheets and charts deliver the facts, they can fail to illustrate quickly and articulately if organisations are;

• Wasting resource on badly planned sales or delivery cycles.
• Paying for extra sales, service or distribution personnel that are not needed.
• Investing in new premises that are not in an optimal location.
• Incorrectly allocating sales leads.

The above represent just a small number of the issues which can be unveiled using internal data and clearly reams of demographic data might be interesting in this respect, but they wouldn’t solve the problem and could even mask it.

In overview, using internal data within a Geoplan solution and/or via consultancy can help to make rapid decisions about how to improve performance.

Success Stories

Cost control is and should continue to be a key consideration and by analysing the customer base geographically, our clients have been able to understand with much greater clarity how to organise their sales or service teams- minimising waste and maximising the return.

• Sales Performance- By visualising and comparing business performance across specific territories we have seen organisations generating high performance in an area of low potential, and vice versa. In these circumstances, visualising the current situation enabled the client to re-allocate resources more effectively to make the most from each region.
• Site Location Analysis- With respect to business expansion, across the retail sector in particular, we work with organisations who need to plan with utmost accuracy where to place a new branch or outlet. Clients such as Whitbread or Yum! Restaurants International need to understand and assess the potential return that a new region could be expected to generate, what the competitive landscape is like, and even whether they may end up competing with their own existing infrastructure.
• Assess and Plan Marketing Campaigns- Businesses also use postcode data to assess and plan marketing campaigns. The insight that comes with a visual representation of success illuminates important trends that raw data does not – in some cases companies have assumed a relatively even level of response for a mailshot, only to discover that set out on a map, specific areas have actually generate a nil return and overtime, a decision may justifiably be made to avoid targeting that area in future.

By and large, the ability to understand business performance and forecast for the future is sitting within internal spreadsheets and databases right now, and what all these examples have in common is that it’s the organisations’ own data which offers all the necessary insight. Our success at Geoplan has been based around helping to create these eureka moments by offering high quality, reliable ways to extract the full benefit from in-house data, be that via our software products or through bespoke consultancy projects with our expert GIS Consultants to aid interpretation.