Chapter 1: What is territory management?

Conquering territory management - The ultimate guide

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What is 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:

  • Sales potential
  • Travel time
  • Workload
  • Customer volume
  • Opportunities
  • Leads
  • Territory size

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

1) Weighted balance. In effect, we are getting the software to prioritize potential sales over the number of accounts. 

2) Work index. Think of a work index as a measure of a rep's workload. Ideally, you want to balance rep workloads and create territories with equal opportunity. 

 


Benefits of territory alignment

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:

  • Improving selling time profitability
  • Reducing travel time and costs
  • Motivating sales reps with high-quality clients
  • Maximizing your overall earning potential

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.