Compare
The spreadsheet is not the enemy. It is the thing that worked.
Almost every territory map starts as a list of ZIP codes in a spreadsheet, and for a lot of businesses that is the right answer for years. It is free, everybody can read it, and it needs no procurement. This page is about the specific point where it stops working, so you can tell whether you are there yet.
While these three things are true, keep the spreadsheet
- One person owns it
- They know which tab is current, which rows are stale, and why that one ZIP is highlighted yellow. Nothing is written down because nothing needs to be.
- It changes rarely
- A new branch every few months, and somebody remembers to update the copy in the CRM and the one the call centre uses.
- A person reads every answer
- Somebody looks up the address, thinks for a second, and applies the judgement that is not in the sheet. The sheet is an aid, not the decision.
If all three still describe you, buying software would be solving a problem you do not have.
Five things that end it
None of these is about the spreadsheet being unprofessional. They are all about it being one person's knowledge in a file that cannot be asked questions.
- The second copy appears
- The website needs the list, so it gets pasted into a form config. The CRM needs it, so it becomes a workflow rule. Now there are three, they were correct on the day they were made, and nothing tells you when they stop agreeing. The first symptom is a customer told two different things.
- Somebody asks about last March
- A franchisee, a partner or a customer disputes where a job went. The sheet holds today. The version that was live in March is either in somebody’s email or it is gone, and an answer assembled after the fact by an interested party carries no weight.
- The address is not the ZIP code
- A ZIP code is a set of postal delivery routes, not an area, so a street can straddle two of them and a code can cover half a county. A list cannot express "this side of the road", and the failure looks like a customer being told nobody serves them on a road your crews drive down daily.
- Coverage is not a question you can ask
- Which codes are on two lists? Which are on none? A spreadsheet can answer neither without somebody building a comparison by hand, so gaps are found by complaint rather than by looking.
- The answer has to explain itself
- When routing is a lookup nobody recorded, "why did this go there" has no answer beyond somebody’s memory of the sheet. That is fine inside one company and it is not fine between two.
You do not throw the list away
The list is a perfectly good way to describe a territory, and everybody in the business already speaks it. What changes is what happens at decision time: the codes become boundaries with an owner, an address is geocoded to a point and tested against them, and the answer comes back with the reason that produced it.
Importing a ZIP list is the first thing the product does, and it is the same list. If you want to see what yours looks like as a shape before deciding anything, the coverage tool draws it with no account and no email.
There is more on why the codes are not shapes in ZIP codes are not shapes.
What software costs that the spreadsheet does not
Money, obviously: ours starts at $149 a month and the spreadsheet is free. But also a setup afternoon, a second place your territories live until you trust it, and a dependency on somebody else's uptime for a lookup you currently do in a file on your own laptop.
Those are real and they are the reason to wait until one of the five above is actually happening to you rather than buying against a future you are imagining.