A sales territory plan is a critical element of a successful sales organization. Territories are typically defined by either a rep’s location or their expertise.
Sales territories should be reevaluated quarterly or yearly. Prospects may move to new areas, or competitors could lure away potential customers.
Account-Level Reporting
Account-level reporting enables sales leaders to compare and analyze the performance of territories easily. This allows them to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their teams and adjust their strategies accordingly. It also helps them to identify key accounts and opportunities and allocate them appropriately.
Effective territory sales management is focused on more than current customers but must always pursue new opportunities. Using customer mapping tools to collect and visualize crucial data points like buyer information, opportunity pipeline stages, and more — can help sales leaders create balanced territories that provide reps with enough opportunities to hit their quotas.
Whether you’re working with customer information your CRM or third-party data have collected, the best sales territory planning software will help you build agile structures that adapt to change. This is important because client accounts may change over time. For instance, if a large customer downsizes or reduces their purchasing needs, your sales team will likely need to either reassign the accounts to other reps or find new ones to pursue.
Geo-Targeting
Mapping territories by geography offers a simple, practical approach to assigning sales reps. With geographic boundaries at the state, county, city, or ZIP code level, your team can avoid unwanted territory overlaps and allocate resources to the highest-value accounts and opportunities.
The right balance of workload and account allocation can increase your top-performing salespeople’s productivity and boost strategic customer relationships. Studies show that optimizing sales territories can result in a 2-7% increase in total revenue, even without adjusting total resources or sales strategy.
Use historical sales data to define territories with a high growth potential. Then, divide the territory’s current customers into clusters based on their geographic or industry-based location. This helps you allocate your salespeople evenly and prevents them from losing valuable existing business to competitors.
Using CRM software with sales mapping tools can reduce the time your salespeople spend planning routes, giving them more time to focus on closing deals.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Using account-based marketing (ABM) allows you to proactively align field sales and marketing to target specific accounts in your database. This approach ensures your field programs are designed around the needs of key decision-makers in each of your targeted accounts.
ABM analyzes and segments your audience into distinct groups based on their geographic boundaries, behavioral demographics, revenue potential, and other factors. This enables more personalized and tailored marketing efforts for each group, improving conversion rates and generating better ROI for your business.
One common way to divide sales territories is by product line. For example, a software company might assign each sales rep a territory that covers B2B sales within a particular industry, such as healthcare or finance. A telecommunications company, on the other hand, might allocate sales territories by customer size, with each sales team member responsible for selling to customers in a certain revenue range.
However, this method often results in unbalanced territories. A sales leader can overcome this issue by conducting a skills inventory and comparing territory designs using different methods to determine which ones offer the fairest distribution of leads.
Account-Based Sales (ABS)
A comprehensive account-based sales platform enables you to develop and execute a targeted approach for each of your key accounts. It includes sales and marketing team collaboration features, data-driven decision-making, and performance measurement. It also allows you to develop and deliver personalized content for your target accounts.
A well-designed territory sales plan provides the foundation for strong long-term customer and market relationships. It ensures your sales teams are matched with the right prospects, and you spend time and resources on quality leads.
In the past, sales reps often opted for a spray-and-pray approach to prospecting. However, a tailored strategy can result in significantly higher revenue and lower costs because you only work with high-value customers.
An account-based sales approach suits B2B companies that sell complex, high-value products or services. It enables you to identify and prioritize each account’s needs, understand their buying process, and deliver personalized messaging that resonates. In addition to assessing the value of each target account, you can also monitor performance metrics like win rate by account type and account retention rates to evaluate how well your ABS strategy is working.
Account-Level Alignment
A sales territory design that aligns differently from current market conditions can quickly become obsolete. This might be due to economic shifts, changes in customer priorities, or a competitor luring away potential accounts. The best sales territory planning software should have a built-in mechanism that automatically assesses, models, and makes necessary adjustments to ensure that all territories are balanced and optimized to generate revenue at least as efficiently as the previous year.
This should be a collaborative process that involves your sales team. This way, they can help you make more data-driven decisions. You can also get their input on how to improve the existing plan.
For example, suppose they see that one of the territories has more opportunities in the health and beauty industry than food & beverage. In that case, they might recommend ranking it as a higher-quality territory.
Conclusion
In conclusion, use data-driven insights to identify and prioritize new opportunities. You can then define account-level goals for each territory. These could include revenue or activity goals like call, email, and demo targets. You should also set territory-specific lead nurturing cadences and integrate with marketing automation to nurture leads until they’re sales-ready.
