Creating and managing sales territories can be challenging. It involves analyzing and segmenting your market based on geographic boundaries, industry and customer characteristics, and revenue potential.
Well-balanced territories help your team stay motivated and productive, meet quotas, and grow your business. However, rapid changes in the business environment can impact even the best territory plan.
Automated Scheduling
When managing sales territories, the nuances of each rep’s job are crucial to success. However, relying on manual processes like spreadsheets can lead to errors that reduce productivity and damage trust between teams and customers.
A territory mapping tool helps you automate these processes, allowing your team to focus more on selling. Sales territory planning tools can also help you make informed decisions based on data, such as revenue heat maps, to optimize your sales strategy and boost your bottom line.
For example, if a territory is not performing well relative to others, you can use sales mapping software to determine where to rebalance or shift resources. Using these data-driven insights, you can increase your revenue potential by ensuring that each territory has an equally balanced workload and can effectively meet revenue goals. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can use this information to create an equitable territory plan based on factors such as business size, industry, target demographic, and product/service need. This allows you to maximize the number of qualified leads or accounts assigned to each rep, which can improve performance and growth over time.
Increased Productivity
When sales leaders have visibility into sales territories, they can make decisions that maximize productivity and achieve quota. For example, suppose your team hasn’t been able to hit their targets or are overselling. In that case, you can use predictive AI models to re-assign territories fairly and transparently, giving each rep a similar opportunity to sell. This helps maintain buy-in from your sales team and prevents any frustration and resentment.
You can also use territory management tools to create individual beat plans for your field sales teams. These will consider territory size, serviceable area, and skillset to create a balanced plan to help your team meet their goals. These individual sales beat plans can be a great tool to motivate your sales teams and ensure they get the most out of their territory. A well-designed sales territory plan will allow you to analyze and track essential sales KPIs that can be used to identify gaps and opportunities, capitalize on winning strategies, and drive innovation and data-driven decision-making. This is a vital part of effective sales leadership that can significantly impact performance and drive results for your organization.
Enhanced Collaboration
Territory design is a team effort that involves multiple stakeholders. Using sales performance tools that facilitate communication and collaboration can make this process much smoother and allow you to develop more accurate territory business plans.
Having accurate and detailed data for your territory business plan can boost your team’s productivity by ensuring they have a manageable amount of accounts to focus on. This will help them build long-term customer relationships, leading to loyalty and repeat purchases. Having consistent territories also means that your salespeople can better meet customer needs, which can result in improved retention rates.
A strong territory business plan should account for both threats and opportunities, as well as a balance between workload and compensation. This will ensure that each territory is a good fit for your team members’ capabilities and that they are well-rested and well-rested.
When assessing the quality of your territories, consider factors such as the number of prospects and accounts, the average customer value in each territory, and the current pipeline opportunities in each territory. Evaluating these data types based on a geographical view can pinpoint instances where your territories may be unbalanced and inform what course corrections you need.
Real-Time Data
Whether you’re looking to optimize your territory design or want to ensure that sales teams achieve their full potential, real-time data can help you make the right decisions at the right time. Using a field sales management tool, you can track and monitor performance metrics like account quotas, new customer acquisition, and repeat purchases to measure the effectiveness of your plan. Then, you can adjust the plan accordingly and stay on target to meet or exceed your goals.
Effective sales territory planning requires thoroughly analyzing your products and customer base. It involves analyzing your product portfolio to find natural partner products or services—the “Would you like fries with that?” strategy—to maximize sales opportunities. It also involves analyzing your existing customer accounts to identify opportunities for expansion and growth. Then, it would help if you mapped these opportunities to a sales territory that makes sense for your team’s skillset and capabilities.
To do this, you must compare workloads, design territories matching your team’s capacity, and set achievable quota targets. Then, you must monitor churn rates and account growth—especially in key strategic accounts—to ensure your plans work as intended. As markets change, it’s important to reevaluate and adjust your territory plans as needed to capitalize on the most lucrative opportunities.
Arman Ali, respects both business and technology. He enjoys writing about new business and technical developments. He has previously written content for numerous SaaS and IT organizations. He also enjoys reading about emerging technical trends and advances.
