Salesforce Maps vs. Field Service
Salesforce Maps and Salesforce’s Field Service (formerly “Field Service Lightning”, and occasionally “Field Service Management”) can look pretty similar on first inspection. Both the products of acquisitions (with FS growing out of the acquisition of ClickSoftware, and Maps from MapAnything), they share some feature/functionality overlaps as a result of their independent development. They both feature a lot of, well, maps, and routing tools, and fancy, helpful things you can automate or streamline with business rules. Which means we often get asked to help determine which is the right tool for a given job, especially when it falls somewhere in that common area between the two. So, in today’s post, I figured I’d give us a quick breakdown of the high level differences between the two!
Let’s jump in!
Field Service
Salesforce’s Field Service is really built around the concept of delivering timely, effective help — anywhere. There’s a reason Salesforce has it under the Service Cloud umbrella. If you have people in the field, doing a service, Field Service is probably the right tool for the job. Think telecom service techs, roadside-assistance/tow truck operators, plumbers, locksmiths — the kind of organizations that might traditionally rely on a central dispatch communicating with a fleet. These are the business processes where FS really shines.
Salesforce Maps
Salesforce Maps, on the other hand, lives under the Sales Cloud umbrella. And, while it also has route-planning, mapping, etc… those tools here are really designed to integrate with sales objects like Leads and Opportunities to help make your sales team in the field more effective. Where FS will help you plan an efficient route for techs that will also prioritize case severity, Maps will help your field sales reps recognize other nearby prospects, opportunities, or leads that fit your qualification criteria, so they can make other high-yield visits during their visit to Opportunity X. It also has functionality built around creating sales territories based on any GIS map data, so you can use it to build fair, equitable sales territories for the entire world or global region, down to single country, town, or anywhere in between. Because state lines, timezones, and employee counts don’t always make for effective sales territory distribution. So, for Salesforce Maps, think sales organizations with territory needs, field sales people, or service providers where the providers are also, essentially, the sales team.
Like a landscaping operation who, after completing work for a client, wants to be able to effectively market/sell to the homes and offices nearby. If their team can quickly map the most-recently sold homes, who might not yet have signed on a landscaping firm, or use a map of county-water usage to identify opportunities for sprinkler modernization, they’re going to be able to improve their win-rate and spend their time more effectively.
Interestingly, that GIS flexibility also gives Maps some surprising benefits to certain non-sales operations. In our experience, Maps is often the right fit for scientific or public-sector projects, where territory creation based on GIS data isn’t necessitated by sales teams, but as a tool to provide more meaningful insight to collected data, to analyze relationships between custom objects geographically, or to create rule-constructed and data-driven territories to help plan legislation or public works. So, while university programs and public policy centers aren’t exactly sending sales people out into the field very often, Maps is often a terrific fit for the functionality they need, especially given Sales Cloud’s adaptability in terms of customization and configuration.
So, the short version is:
And, if you still have questions about which is the right fit for your specific project, just give us a call! We’re always happy to help.
In the meantime, keep working hard, smart, and happy. We’ll see you in the cloud.
