by Accelerating sales pipeline growth is challenging for all sales reps, managers, and operations leaders. The organization expects growth regardless of market conditions, competitor activity, or economic headwinds. And mapping software can help. How? It gives you an additional tool to analyze your sales data and gain new information, leading to new sales strategy, planning, and territory management approaches. Below are some ideas that might make you rethink your view on leveraging maps for better decisions on sales strategy.
There is no better way to understand how much the competition encroaches on your sales growth than seeing their customer locations on a map.
It is the primary building block to the success of your profitable sales growth. Who should your customer be? How do you acquire more ideal clients? But seeing is believing, so you need to visualize locations once you know who they are.
Ideal clients in Denver
Filter data to show ideal client locations
There are three main types of sales territory:
1. Geography based, where you assign all accounts in a boundary (Zipcode is the most granular level for geography-based territories) to your sales reps. It is the most common alignment type.
2. Account-based, assigning accounts to reps (key or major account managers) regardless of geography. You want to ensure that the customer gets the undivided attention of your specialists.
3. Hybrid-based, as the name suggests, you utilize geography and account-based alignments offering the greatest flexibility.
You will create geographical areas for your reps if you have a sales team or franchise. If you manage those areas on spreadsheets, you can take advantage of the power of sales territory mapping. Territory maps bring new levels of insight and inform sales strategy and planning decisions.
Quickly analyze areas for overlaps. The beauty of your map is that you can see those overlapping areas and act. Analyze areas for growth opportunities or territory mergers and use your data-backed scenarios to assess regions for inefficiencies and fix them.
Mapping your sales pipeline using a regional or hotspot heatmap can be a game-changer. Visualizing the sales pipeline in relation to customer and prospect locations opens up new sales potential for revenue ops, sales ops, and sales leaders.
Real World Scenario
There is one week left in the quarter, and you have some high-potential sales opportunities ready to close but requiring a last-ditch sales effort.
Creating a color-coded map filtered to only display sales opportunities with a 75% or higher probability of closing and sharing it with your sales team to hone their schedules can be the difference between hitting or missing the quarter.
Spreadsheets are essential in managing your sales data but lack a crucial feature. They cannot bring your data to life. When you display your customers' actual sales on a map and overlay their sales potential (their total addressable spend), you unlock new insights into how you could structure your sales territories. Optimizing your sales territories on sales potential is best practice and has proven to boost revenue and sales productivity.
Optimize your sales territories with territory mapping software. As mentioned above, optimizing sales territories on sales potential is a best practice. So too, using a workload index.
Think of your workload index as an advanced tool ensuring all sales reps apply equal effort to maximize their sales potential. Or, in simpler terms, your sales territory workload (the number of sales calls required and the time taken to travel and in meetings) is balanced for all reps.
That benefits your organization, reps, and customers, driving utilization and reducing imbalances.
With territory mapping software, you have optimized your sales territories on workload and sales potential and now take your effectiveness to another level with route optimization mapping software. Route optimization for sales reps means more calls completed in less time. The software uses sophisticated algorithms to take your customer data and locations and plots your optimal day and week.
Your reps can adjust their schedules on the fly to account for a last-minute cancellation, a new stop, traffic, or any other circumstance they find themselves in. Plus, any schedule changes are sent back to sales operations, providing real-time visibility into progress and performance.
Use Heatmaps to analyze your sales coverage hotspots. Analyze your sales by product regularly. Are there growth trends in certain products that appear to be potential "hotspots?" For instance, a low-volume product may grow by more than 100% monthly. Will it be your future best seller? Use your analysis to ensure your resource your highest-growth sales areas effectively.
Map your metrics for sales meetings
You hold regular sales reviews with your sales reps; why not transform engagement by mapping your key numbers?
For example:
- Display your sales performance by territory
- Plot your competitor locations and plan a new campaign
- Show your pipeline forecasts by area
- Highlight your product performance by sales rep
- Map your new leads and opportunities
The possibilities are endless, so bring your data to life and make sales meetings more engaging with your maps.
Check out our Conquering mapping software guide
Whether hiring a new sales rep or realigning sales territories, mapping excels. Your ideal location for a representative is a weighted center. A weighted center considers your customer locations and your perfect location for your reps is close to customers.
A common problem with territory design is that the salesperson's location is too far from customer concentrations, requiring excessive drive time.
Ideal location
Actual location
When expanding your team or hiring due to staff turnover, you can select your ideal location first and, where possible, hire someone near that spot.
Use maps for your sales coaching sessions
In an ideal world, sales managers would spend 60% of their time coaching their sales teams. That is not always realistic, so making those coaching sessions count is critical, and mapping software can make coaching more valuable as it plays to a natural human strength. We learn visually.
Real World Scenario
You are onboarding a new sales rep and want to coach them on prioritizing their selling time and focusing on the highest-priority customers. Using a sales territory map and advanced filters to display the highest-priority customer locations, you have an interactive tool perfect for your coaching sessions.
Map your win/loss pipeline reviews
As a sales manager, you will regularly review won and lost deals. Those reviews are a perfect coaching session, encouraging collaboration and fun to bind the team together. As a group, collectively isolate and discuss the reasons you win sales deals — and the areas in which you might fall short. Learn from successes and failures as a unit. Adding geographic content, you may uncover regional differences in win rates and learn new insights.
Map your sales productivity or utilization numbers
How can you transform sales productivity and results? Analyze the levels of administration your organization imposes on your sales reps.
According to Forbes, the average salesperson spends 35.2% of their time selling. Even a 1% increase in selling time impacts revenue with little additional effort. When you're you're mapping out sales territories, watch out for unbalanced workloads. A good formula for this is: Average call or meeting duration + Average travel time * Call frequency.
Use your territory mapping software to compare call frequencies and close rates, see the regional performance firsthand, and take some actions to improve or rebalance results.