For the traveling salesperson, nothing is more exciting than a perpetual road trip in a convertible and a zeal for winning deals for their company. The top salesperson is always on the move, knowing who to meet and what to discuss during their appointments with potential clients. Picture this: on a typical day, this top sales person wants to know who all they are meeting, where they are going, and how they will get there. If they are using a CRM program, they will open all their appointments one by one, note down the address of all the contacts or leads they are supposed to meet, and put these addresses in Bing Maps to find directions.

This just seems like too much work, especially for our champion traveling salesperson. Why not just make things easier and more exciting for them?

This is where PowerMap comes into the picture. We already know that PowerMap maps common entities like accounts, contacts or leads in the form of pins, but why not take things a little further and also map appointments on a map, so that our salesperson could just look at all their appointments pinned on a map and also find driving directions from one appointment to another (and another, and another..) with just a click of a button? The best part is, they can do all this within CRM!

To achieve this, we need to set a few things up in the background.

1. Ensure that the lead entity (or whichever entity the appointments are regarding) is geocoded.
2. Add two fields on the appointment form: Latitude and Longitude.
3. Create a workflow that fetches the parent entity's (lead, in our example) latitude and longitude and puts them on the appointment.
4. Add the appointment entity to Entities to Map in PowerMap.

Now to really get started. First, we have to make sure that the lead entity is geocoded and that we have latitude/longitude information for addresses in lead records. Once that's done, go ahead and add two Floating Point Number fields on the appointment form. Call them Latitude and Longitude. Set Minimum Value
of Latitude to -90.00000 and Maximum to
90.00000 with a precision of 5. Similarly, set Longitude from -180.00000 to 180.00000 with a precision of 5.

We are halfway there already!

Now create a workflow that gets the latitude/longitude from the "regarding" lead record. This workflow will trigger when an appointment is created.

Finally, go to PowerPack > Entities to Map and add Appointment to the list, and map the Latitude and Longitude fields to the appointment entity's Latitude and Longitude fields. Leave the "Geocode New and Updated Records" checkbox unchecked because we are not really entering address information on the appointment—our workflow will be pulling the geocode information for appointments.

That's it! Now if go to PowerMap, you will see Appointments listed there. Choose a convenient view for appointments and you will see those records pinned on the map. Click the directions icon on each of the appointments in the order in which you want to travel, and PowerMap will give you driving directions instantly!

Your sales team can look at their daily appointments on PowerMap, find driving directions, and also print them from within CRM if they'd like. Mapping appointments in Dynamics CRM with PowerMap is win-win for everyone!

Not using PowerMap yet? Visit the PowerMap page and try it free for 30 days.

Happy CRM'ing!