Effective territory management is a problem most sales leaders, sales operations leaders and sales analysts agonize over. However, when you manage territories well, you can increase revenue and transform outside sales team efficiency.
We hear from a lot of leaders who say their sales and service team members don’t fully understand their territories. This gap in understanding leads to lost opportunities.
But using a territory builder and realigning sales territories can result in a 2-7% increase in your sales.
In this blog, we will focus on two essential topics:
- How to manage your sales territories
- How to successfully grow sales in your sales territories
How to master effective territory management
Display geographic coverage for each salesperson
Clear communication is an essential part of effective territory management. Many salespeople don’t know the clear boundaries of their responsibility. Creating a clear, interactive territory view will help.
Overlay account and sales lead locations
It’s common for sales leaders to ask, “Where are my high-value accounts located?” With eSpatial, you can plot each salesperson’s accounts and leads within a territory. This helps you see the geographic spread of the business in a region. It also shows your hot spot areas and where your salesperson needs to spend more time.
Balance sales territories
Sales leaders also need to know which territories are doing well and which ones are struggling. With a sales territory management tool, you can view a percentage overview across your regions. At a glance, you can tell which territories are pulling in the biggest chunk of your revenue. Many sales leaders balance their territories with historical sales data, but looking at potential sales is also useful for effective sales territory management.
How to successfully grow sales within territories
Re-align territories
You’re probably used to your quarterly territorial reviews. During this process, sales territories are often realigned or moved based on a gut feeling. It’s not the best way to realign your regions, but many sales leaders are trying to figure this process out on their own.
Using a balancing tool, you see the impacts your changes have as you change territory boundaries. You can view how many accounts Jeff owns, and how a change might impact a colleague’s revenue.
What if analysis
eSpatial gives you the intelligence backed decision-making ability to realign your regions successfully and stay ahead of the competition.
It’s easy to see the impact of changes as you work and create multiple scenarios. By having multiple options and their effects ready to compare, you can confidently make data-driven decisions faster. And since eSpatial is an online tool, sharing and iterating is simple.
To learn more about how scenario planning fits into effective territory management, read our guide on how to make faster, smarter decisions with scenario planning.
Strategically target leads
Once your salespeople have well balanced territories, they need to know how to prioritize their time for the best results. Part of effective territory management is communicating strategic goals and training on how to use tools to get the best results.
Say you’re pushing to increase the size of your average sale. Your salespeople can use filtering to identify high potential leads in their territory. From this they can create a plan using route optimization. This will ensure they’re meeting high potential leads as efficiently as possible.
Review:
The market is always changing. New competitors emerge and go out of business. You sign new clients and lose them. That’s why effective territory management includes regular review.
Regular reviews of your territories will allow you to:
- Save money and increase sales by optimizing resources
- Give outside sales reps the best chance at success
- Improve morale since no sales or service person is over or under-worked
- Delight your customers with efficient service