Before you start drawing boundaries, you need to choose the right structure. There are different types of sales territory design, and the right choice depends on your market, sales structure, product mix, business model, your sales cycle, and your team's strengths.
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What is Territory Design?
But it's more than just drawing lines on a map. A robust sales territory design process is the "connective tissue" between your high-level revenue goals and your rep’s daily schedule.
At its core, territory design is the strategic process of dividing your market into defined areas, customer groups, or segments to ensure every lead or customer is covered and every rep has a fair shot at hitting quota.
The 3 Core Types of Sales Territory Design
It is the most common and easiest model to adopt. You assign a rep to a specific physical area like a city, state, or set of postcodes.
- Best for: Field sales teams where "face time" matters
- The Benefit: It slashes travel time and creates clear accountability. And it is the simplest.
Here, geography takes a back seat. Reps are assigned specificlists of named accounts, often based on a target vertical or existingrelationships or company size (e.g., Enterprise vs. Mid-Market).
Best for: Strategic, high-value B2B sales where relationshipstrump proximity.
As the name suggests you leverage both types of sales territorydesign, geographic and account-based.
Best for: Coverage and flexibility.
The "Hidden" Design Error: Ignoring Travel Time?
If you are designing sales territory boundaries using a spreadsheet, you are missing a critical variable: Geography. A rep with 50 accounts in downtown Manhattan has a vastly different workload than a rep with 50 accounts spread across rural Texas. If you treat them as "equal" on a spreadsheet, you create imbalance and potential burnout. Modern territory design process tools account for drive time and road networks, ensuring that "fair" actually means "doable".
Pro-Tip for Sales Ops: Don't Mistake "Crow Flies" for "Drive Time." When drawing boundaries, many teams calculate distance in a straight line ("as the crow flies"). This is a mistake. A 20-mile radius in rural Texas is a quick drive; a 20-mile radius in downtown Los Angeles is a day-long traffic jam. Always use drive-time analysis to determine the actual size of a territory.
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“We wanted to know for each of our plants. What is the plant's low-cost service area? What is the geographic region around that plant? And whether that plant is the most cost-effective option to ship concrete. We wanted to take advantage of that. We also wanted to know the most costly delivery areas in central Texas. And which of our customers are in those areas.”
“The first quick win for us was that eSpatial was so easy to use. After using so many other applications, eSpatial was the easiest for importing our data and identifying the fields and hierarchies that would deliver efficient alignments. At the end of the day, you are finalizing the sales territory in front of their eyes. It is much more real to the key stakeholders, which has been transformational for Thermo Fisher.”
“Sales data can be mapped in minutes. That has saved us countless numbers of hours. And we have eliminated steps from the design and approvals process leading to faster more efficient alignments in less time. The findings in our eSpatial visualizations are definitely going to inform 2022 strategy for the better. 100%, we're going to renew our eSpatial license.”
“We're always trying to improve our output and what we're putting in front of executive management teams and boards. We started looking around at different data visualization and mapping software programs and did a fair amount of due diligence on multiple companies. After vetting various platforms, eSpatial rose to the top of our list. I personally can say that we've loved it ever since.”
“I've been in this industry for 35 years, and to have a tool that I can pick up and use quickly just means the world to me. With eSpatial, I can create reports and make changes in 20 minutes, it's easy to log in and update things quickly. You wouldn't think in mapping software you would have someone so responsive in technical support. That was the prime reason I settled on eSpatial.”
“eSpatial has been an awesome tool for Starkey. From our territory planning; splitting territories, adjusting for local details, communicating and mocking up options. Then giving that updated detail to our sales team along with live access to CRM and trip planning. And then representing everything in a beautiful way that we love to use in presentations - it is truly a very impressive package.”
“eSpatial is an irreplaceable tool for our business, for example we are now able to run one of our key processes 32 times faster and have been able to double the number of customers we can visit in a given week by making better decisions. You can't control how much time you have in a given day, but you can control how it is used and eSpatial has certainly helped us significantly with that.”
