Review by Mark B

MapPoint is definitely a step up from your typical online mapping tools. However, I’m not sure that it’s practical for use in business planning like it tries to be. You can map territories, match your product to demographics, and map clients and prospect business, but there is no real compelling reason to do this in MapPoint. The data is likely a couple of years old already, and it does not come with free updates (except for road construction updates, which is the last thing you care about for business planning). Other features like routing and finding nearby places is likewise crippled by old data, so I have found I am better off with technology like my GPS, iPhone, or the internet in general. The most useful feature to date has been the ability to import our client and prospect data, so that I can see where our clients are, where our course attendees are coming from, and where there is a high concentration of untapped prospects. Again, one doesn’t really need MapPoint for this, but it does give a nice visual representation of the data.