In today's fiercely competitive environment, effective territory management is an essential pillar of any successful strategy. By prioritizing prospects and customers across various data densities, industries and geographies, you can drive dramatic improvements in sales performance to reach and exceed your goals.
With careful planning and the right solutions, companies can:
In addition, territory management software can help you build, balance, and re-align territories faster than ever - what used to take a week or more, you can now do in just hours. And advanced visualization tools provide a deeper understanding of your data, delivering actionable insights that help you identify under or over-served areas.
Let's begin with the basics: A sales territory is a specific geographic area, business industry, or customer account segment that's assigned to an individual salesperson or team.
Let's begin with the basics: A sales territory is a specific geographic area, business industry, or customer account segment that's assigned to an individual salesperson or team. Each territory is defined based on a combination of various factors, including:
The ultimate goal of dividing regions, groups and sectors into these territories is to target a specific market with a tailored strategy that boosts sales effectiveness while reducing costs. However, this is easier said than done.
The structure, distribution and borders of your territories will have a significant impact on team performance, sales efficiency and your organization's overall bottom line. From balancing and alignment to management and mapping, you and your reps need a firm grasp on the specific customer groups, industries and regions for which you're responsible. That means effective territory management is key.
Territory management is a comprehensive process and methodology designed to control, optimize and improve sales territory alignment and resource allocation. By monitoring and evaluating the performance of your various territories, you can refine their structure as you go to boost efficiency and sales effectiveness.
The primary objective here is to maximize your selling time and optimize resource distribution to invest more in your high-potential areas and high-priority customers. However, territory management must also take sales reps into account, ensuring they have the opportunity to meet quotas and maintain existing client relationships.
In the process, you'll likely face challenges, such as unbalanced or underserved territories. When resources and sales activities are misdirected to low-value verticals, it can have significant impacts on sales rep productivity and client relationships, not to mention your revenue. The best way to prevent this from happening is through effective territory alignment and balancing.
Territory alignment is a proven productivity strategy in which a company distributes accounts to individual sales or service reps by specific geographic or regional territories. The basic building blocks are states, counties, ZIP code areas, or accounts (often referred to as accounts-based territory design). Territory balancing ensures that territories offer field-based teams equal opportunity or sales potential. Ensuring the organization maximizes revenue potential.
You may also want to balance your assigned territories on factors like:
It's often best to select multiple weighted factors that are relevant to your overall business goals. You can align and balance your territories for optimal performance and efficiency. In the example above, we used two balances
Unbalanced territories are a headache for sales operations, leaders, and sales and service teams. If a sales or service territory is too big or if the workload is too heavy, your team cannot effectively cover all customers and prospects.
A salesperson whose territory lacks opportunity or has too little workload can waste their potential on low-priority clients, leading to underutilized sales resources and an unmotivated salesforce. As a result, the company loses money, time, and potential customers.
Balanced territories are effective and efficient, allowing you to get the most from your sales team by allocating more equitable sales opportunities.
With strategic, equitable alignment and balancing, you can get the most out of your sales team by:
At the end of the day, the way you align and balance your territories has a massive effect on your bottom line. To ensure you're achieving your revenue goals, you need an effective territory management system and process.
A significant benefit from sales territory mapping is increased sales and reduced costs. Territory management will improve market coverage allowing sales teams to be more efficient at making each sale and grasping new opportunities, gaining a competitive advantage.
Aligned territories will result in balanced workloads for sales and service personnel, providing them greater earning potential, improved morale, and career satisfaction. It leads to higher motivation and lower staff turnover. Look for a Territory mapping tool that includes route optimization capabilities.
The next step after optimizing territories is to ensure your sales and service team optimize their selling days. With route optimization software, you can add an extra daily call by providing an optimal schedule.
Visualizing territories using mapping software allows you to access analytical tools and performance reporting options. With Mapping software, you can easily aggregate your data to get consolidated performance views. You can segment and filter data, isolating sales above or below a specific value. You can also overlay demographic and geographic data to identify insights into your market.
Share maps with your team, who can create reports, analyze their territories, and measure their current performance against quotas and targets. You can share new alignments or territory scenarios for approval.
The human brain can interpret visual content faster and easier than textual information. The brain interprets almost 90% of all information visually, so sales teams and managers take note.
It's proven that managers who use visual data tools are 28% more likely to find relevant information than those who rely solely on traditional reporting and spreadsheets. Data Visualization lets you optimize and visualize the data from your CRM and spreadsheets. An interactive map allows discovering hidden insights and patterns not possible in spreadsheets.
Seeing a territory from a variety of different perspectives allows for bigger picture but also more granular insight. For example, zoom in to see greater detail based on market characteristics such as customer types or assigned sales reps.
Territory management software enables collaboration and sharing between sales managers and sales personnel. You and your sales team can better input/edit sales data and plan. For sales teams located remotely, seamless collaboration is essential. Cloud-based solutions allow teams to collaborate and give real-time feedback on alignments from any office location or field.
For example, a nationwide sales team member can add their data, latest sales, or leads to a territory daily, creating a complete, up-to-date holistic view of their Territory. Sales leaders can share historical sales performance, territory definitions, and current performance against quota. It facilitates a constructive sales performance conversation using a single source of sales data.
The instantaneous nature of collaboration in online territories reduces the necessity of expensive and time-consuming onsite sales performance reviews. Easily share territory maps publicly or privately online. Include in your presentations, and high-quality print hard copies. For sales teams located remotely, seamless collaboration is critical. Cloud-based solutions allow teams to collaborate on the definition of their territories from any location, office, or field in real-time.
Let's take a closer look at some of the additional benefits that territory management solutions can bring to your organization.
No optimization tool is perfect, even with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning algorithms. Your territory management solution should give you the ability to make manual adjustments as needed.
For larger organizations, account exceptions are a must-have. When you're creating your geographic sales territories, you'll likely have a few accounts dedicated to different representatives. Account exceptions allow you to allocate specific customers to different reps outside of the region.
It's always a good idea to get external input on your alignment scenarios. This "seeing and sharing" feature is critical, enabling different people to offer suggestions based on local knowledge.
By tracking workload metrics (i.e., the number of accounts for each rep), you can see where some territories are overburdened and others are underutilized. With a weighted balance tool, you can adjust your reps' workloads for optimal performance. For example, you could create a balance of 30% time spent with prospects, and 70% spent with existing accounts.
In the image above, we add a workload balance. Update the call frequency and duration in minutes and eSpatial will calculate the travel time. Each territory will require an equal level of effort from each rep to maximize sales potential.
Visualizing your territories and sales data with a mapping tool allows you to gain a better understanding of your team's performance and present detailed analyses and reports. That way, you can track KPIs, analyze territories and share new insights easily.
We talked briefly about mapping your territories, but how do sales operations actually do it? Fortunately, you don't need to be a cartographer in today's day and age; all you need is a good mapping software.
A modern mapping solution allows you to bring your data to life with more meaningful visualizations. Simply upload your existing geographic, customer and sales data from spreadsheets, CRM or ERP systems, and the software automatically generates a vibrant map with actionable insights.
This visual display enables seamless interaction with highly flexible features and filters to dig deeper into your data. The best mapping solutions offer annotation and communication capabilities to share maps and collaborate with leadership and other team members. With these visualization and collaboration tools, it's faster and easier to draw insights that drive better decision-making.
Before you begin mapping territories based on intuition, it's important to take a step back and look at your overarching business goals. Start by defining your objectives, whether it's revenue, sales volumes or another target. With these goals clearly outlined, you can better align your territories as you go.
When you're ready to start mapping, follow these steps:
Once you've completed these steps, keep an eye on the performance of your new territories and make adjustments along the way.
Whether you're new to the world of territory mapping or you're looking for a better solution, your starting point should always be to assess your business needs and expectations. Ask yourself what you're trying to achieve with your sales data and how you'd measure success.
When it comes to evaluating your options, you'll want to identify a few essential features, including:
Use this as a checklist in your search, and you're sure to find the right solution for your sales team.
Do you require various levels of visibility to match your sales organization structure? Assuming you do, you should choose a mapping software solution with hierarchal features. These features allow you to set up multiple hierarchal tiers for a territory map.
Look for the following capabilities:
Having a solution that can scale along with your business is vital. Your ideal vendor should be cloud-based as one of the most prominent cloud features, besides reliability, is its ability to scale. When working with sales data, which can be changeable, it needs to be able to grow and update along with your business. On-premise software is limited in its ability to increase capacity and requires time and effort to upgrade.
Cloud-based solutions provide the elasticity for businesses to scale up or down without buying expensive software licenses or installing programs.
Territory management involves the collaboration of multiple users on a sales team. Allowing numerous users to access the same maps can enable time savings and real-time coordination.
When selecting a territory mapping software for your sales team, having the ability to collaborate and even delegate some of the work is crucial.
Look for the following capabilities:
Are you looking to compare your sales data with additional information, such as demographics, to reveal the age, gender, or population of customers in your territories? Look for the following capabilities that support:
Performance reporting will be essential to critical stakeholders in your organization, so it is likely to be a key decider when you are reviewing mapping software provider.
Look for the following capabilities:
Any software you adopt for your organization or sales department must be easy to use. There are many mapping software solutions available; however, most will need a high degree of configuration and customization for territory management.
The perfect mapping solution will have an easy-to-use interface, no install requirements, ongoing automatic updates, and dedicated support.
In-app support is vital for any service used in business today. While many services provide help forums and websites, the vendor you select should give in-app support such as live chat allowing users access to experts on demand. A dedicated account manager is also vital for ongoing support. They will check in with you periodically and can make recommendations to help you achieve your goals based on your usage.
Look for a solution designed and built by Sales Territory Management experts. After all, effective territory management relies on faster and improved processes, and your sales team will use the software daily.
Finally, the vendor should also have a detailed onboarding process to help your sales team quickly become efficient with the software. Use this checklist to identify the best territory mapping software for you. You'll need a mapping software platform with these features: