Draw a Shape, Get Every Business Inside
Neighbourhood drives are a gold mine in field sales. You're already in the area — why not grab every business on the street, add them to today's route, and close two more deals while you're there? The problem: building that list manually is a killer. You're in Excel, squinting at postcodes, copy-pasting into your CRM, praying you didn't miss anyone. Twenty minutes of list-building, two conversations. Lasso-select prospecting kills that friction. Draw a shape around any neighbourhood on the map, get a live list of every business inside that polygon, add them to your route in one click. No postcode hunting. No spreadsheet math. What used to take twenty minutes takes forty seconds. ## How It Works Under the hood, it's two pieces: a map drawing layer (Mapbox GL Draw) and a Postgres spatial query (ST_Within). You tap "draw lasso", sketch a shape on the map — rough polygon, doesn't need to be perfect — and the app sends those coordinates to the backend. The database queries the leads table with ST_Within (returns every point inside your polygon) and serves back the list. Sub-second for typical territory sizes. Here's the query: ```sql SELECT id, name, address, phone, last_contacted FROM leads WHERE ST_Within(location, ST_GeomFromGeoJSON($1)) AND territory_id = $2 ORDER BY last_contacted ASC NULLS FIRST; ``` The location column is a PostGIS point geometry. The `$1` parameter is your drawn polygon as GeoJSON. The result: every lead inside your lasso, sorted by "never contacted" first. ## Why Lasso Beats Postcode Filters Postcode-based prospecting is the bottleneck most teams accept. "Give me everyone in postcodes 4000–4003" works fine if postcodes were designed by humans (they weren't). Postcode boundaries don't follow streets. Your ideal neighbourhood might span three postcodes. The customer's business address is on the postcode border — is it yours or the next rep's? By the time you've verified it, you've lost momentum. Lasso sidesteps the whole problem. You're not thinking in postcodes. You're thinking geographically — "I'm on Chapel Street, I want everyone within a five-minute drive." Draw that shape. Get the list. Done. No ambiguity. The boundary is exactly where you need it. Teams report a 3–4x speed-up in list-building. More importantly, they're no longer constrained by postcode geometry. You can carve out a territory that actually makes sense for your team. ## De-duplication Against Existing CRM New leads that appear in your lasso-selected list are automatically checked against your CRM — leads you've already contacted don't reappear. The system flags warm contacts (you've talked to them before) and hot contacts (they're already in a deal pipeline). You see at a glance who's worth a call vs. who's a skip. For larger lasso-selections (50+ leads), the de-duplication is the difference between hitting a goldmine and re-prospecting the same people for the third time. ## Six Questions Sales Teams Ask **Can I lasso across multiple postcodes?** Yes. The shape doesn't care about postcode boundaries. Draw anywhere on the map. **What if the lead's address is slightly wrong in my database?** ST_Within is strict — your location geometry has to be inside the polygon. Most teams run quarterly address validation (Google Geocoding API) to catch data drift. **Can I save lasso shapes for regular follow-up?** Yes. Name it, store it, re-query it next quarter to find new businesses that moved into the area. **How does it handle leads without a location pin?** They're excluded from the query. Address validation is a prerequisite — if it's not on the map, the system can't lasso it. **Can I export the lasso list to Excel?** Yes. One-click CSV export. But most teams add directly to their route instead. **What if I want to add a few leads manually to the lasso list?** You can. Lasso is a starting point, not a wall. Hand-pick additions in the side panel before adding to route. ## The Bottom Line Lasso-select prospecting is the feature that separates manual field sales from mapped field sales. It takes the thing your reps already do — knock on doors in a neighbourhood — and compresses the list-building step from twenty minutes to forty seconds. For teams doing high-volume neighbourhood drives, it's the difference between "prospecting feels like work" and "prospecting happens while I'm navigating." It's also why Mapbox Draw and PostGIS spatial queries exist — this exact use case. The tooling is mature. The ROI is immediate. See it live at `/pricing`.