Territory management can help your sales reps spend more time calling qualified leads, which translates to higher revenue. This is why a balanced territory plan should be created with the support of sales performance metrics. Territory mapping software allows you to divide your market into succinct territories and tailor them based on customer demographics. It also allows you to follow direct guidelines that may already exist within your business.
Enhanced Efficiency
Whether your team works with existing accounts or develops new business, an effective sales territory management plan will help them focus on their jobs. By dividing their customer base into manageable sales territories, your team can maximize efficiency by spending less time traveling and more time meeting with prospects.
A well-designed sales territory mapping strategy helps to ensure that your team is working with the most valuable customers. It also helps to minimize travel costs, allowing your field sales reps to spend more time with potential clients and increasing the chance of lead conversion.
Using sales territory planning software, you can create and reassess your sales territories on a digital map and make necessary adjustments to balance workloads. You can identify high-density areas, prioritize priority accounts, and analyze the performance of your team’s existing sales territories to uncover opportunities you may have overlooked. Territory mapping software also enables you to create detailed maps of your existing customers and prospects based on specific attributes, such as location or buying behavior. This data can then be used to calculate the potential value of a territory and determine how to best allocate it among your sales reps. This can help to avoid the risk of a territory being over- or undersold, which can damage morale and cause resentment among your team members.
Streamlined Sales Process
When territories are properly aligned and balanced between reps, sales managers can focus on maximizing the number of leads they can convert into paying customers. According to research, optimizing territory design can increase sales by 2-7% without changing total resources or quotas.
Using territory planning software to create new territories, restructure existing ones, or analyze and improve your current strategy can help you achieve these gains. You can better understand why some territories perform while others struggle by using data analytics, insights from your internal sales performance, and up-to-date external demographic data.
The traditional way of dividing up sales territories is to look at geography. Creating geographic boundaries for states, counties, and ZIP codes helps keep teams focused on the best opportunities. However, it’s important to consider other factors when assigning territories, such as rep experience level and the company’s sales goals.
Regularly reviewing and updating your territory sales plan can also help you adjust to changing market conditions, competition, or customer needs. This flexibility will allow your team to meet their quotas and help you stay ahead of the curve in this volatile industry. Involving your entire sales and operations team when collaborating on the plan is also great. This will ensure that everyone has a stake in the outcome, which can reduce resistance to changes and help your team feel invested.
Enhanced Customer Focus
Territories and quotas directly impact the day-to-day work and motivation of sales teams. As a result, territory sales planning can create challenges that must be addressed to ensure sales success.
Developing territories using a comprehensive process enables organizations to balance and optimize sales coverage based on location, accounts, potential revenue, product, industry, and other criteria. Unfortunately, this level of complexity is only possible with the right sales territory mapping software.
In addition to data analysis, territory management requires the input of sales leaders, field reps, and other departments like marketing and operations. Open communication channels like weekly or monthly team meetings, huddles, one-on-one reviews, and feedback surveys can help facilitate the necessary collaboration.
Increased Revenue
The right sales territory alignment and workload balance increase the chance of new customer acquisition. This allows outside sales teams to spend more time interacting with their accounts, reducing travel time and increasing the likelihood of lead conversion. Additionally, a well-defined sales territory plan can help to keep account records and customer information organized, eliminating the risk of duplicate accounts or over/under servicing.
To create targeted strategies for each segment, define your market into succinct territories using sales data, such as customer demographics, revenue potential, and more. By analyzing your market this way, you can identify opportunities and focus on high-value accounts to maximize sales performance.
A well-designed sales territory can also increase your team’s morale, as they can service their assigned accounts better and meet quota goals. However, when a sales territory is not based on factors like value and priority or is distorted by favoritism or seniority, it can have the opposite effect and lead to discontent among the team, increasing turnover.
With modernized territory planning software, you can visualize the distribution of territories and accounts on a map to ensure that they are compact and have geographic contiguity. Additionally, you can use sales data to evaluate the potential and priorities of your territory and make adjustments when needed. You can even plan what-if scenarios to test new territory designs and deployment
