Visual representation is the most interesting way to look at data, and what can be more appealing than looking at colorful pins on a map! The latest version of the Dynamics CRM mapping add-on, PowerMap, can be used in several ways that can provide a visual of how your organization is performing.

Suppose you want to see where your existing customers are spread, where your highest potential lies and whether there is a pattern. To do this, you'll be looking at Accounts (existing customers) and Leads (potential customers). Within Leads you can use different pins for Hot Leads, Warm Leads and Cold Leads, based on views that you create for the purpose of the map.

Here's how it works:

1. These views can be created in the lead entity by doing an advanced find and using a filtering criteria. Use Status = Open and Rating = Hot as your criteria and save it as a view named Hot Leads. Then repeat this for Warm Leads and Cold Leads.

   

2. Navigating back to PowerMap, click on the inline configuration pane. In the Legend section, choose Accounts as your entity and Active Accounts as your view. Similarly, choose Leads but with 3 different views — Hot, Warm and Cold leads, selecting different pins for each. (To get the list of available pins, click on the default pin that appears when selecting an entity.)

   

3. Now click on the – and + buttons on the map to zoom to the desired level. You can also use the Automatic options.

   

Below is the outcome of all this hard work.

You can see in this example that although most of the accounts are from the Midwest and East, the hot and warm leads are concentrated in the West. Perhaps this indicates that my campaigns in that region have made an impact and the business has good potential there. That's great information—all from a PowerMap!

To save yourself the trouble of re-creating the legend the next time you want to see this map definition, you can save the map definition.

Now you can just click on this definition on the configuration pane next time and also be able to share it with others.

There you go--PowerMap makes it easy to plot multiple views of one entity!

Happy CRM'ing!