Territory Plan Templates for Successful Sales Teams

Your business wants to grow by adding new and profitable customers. Your team wants to earn by identifying and closing attractive prospects.

It’s a simple, mutually beneficial relationship. But there’s a third party that disproportionately impacts a sales team’s success or failure. That third party is sales territories.

And it’s not easy to create and optimize them, making it hard to generate the consistent sales growth your business needs.

Many companies use a territory plan template to help them move into new areas and scale their reach. Technology plays an important role in the process.

To help you create effective sales territory plan templates, we will explore foundational information, best practices, and approaches you need to build a successful territory planning.

Important Factors for a Successful Sales Territory Plan Template

Before we jump into the different templates, what factors help create a successful sales territory plan? There are three simple things that you need to consider before starting the sales territory plan process:

1. Data: What data will you use to inform your sales territory planning? (See below for more information on this.)
2. Equity: How will your plan give each sales rep an equitable opportunity and equitable resources to maximize their earnings?
3. Balance: Does every territory in your plan offer sales coverage that matches the sales capacity?

These are your ultimate goals when working on sales territory plan templates: using the right data to create equity and balance. And a 30-60-90 plan is one of the best approaches to reaching those goals.

What is a 30-60-90 Day Sales Territory Plan?

Like all sales territory plan templates, a 30-60-90 day sales territory plan serves as a framework. It’s a blueprint for building out a highly profitable territory for the business. A 30-60-90 day sales territory plan covers the following three things:

1. Research: Spend the first 30 days defining the market, creating customer personas, evaluating from a SWOT perspective, getting to know the competition, and identifying top opportunities.
2. Launch: Before 60 days have expired, launch your territory plan by doing the following: setting sales goals, finding leads, optimizing routes, and setting monthly quotas.
3. Scale: The last portion is optimizing territories to scale for the future. This can include getting feedback from reps, conducting quantitative analyses of performance, talking to customers, etc. All companies want consistent sales growth, and this approach to sales territory plans helps you get there.

This is just a high-level overview of what it’s like to use a 30-60-90 day sales territory plan template. But you’ll want to consider your sales reps and your unique circumstances and needs when creating this type of plan for your business and sales team.

How to Create a 30-60-90 Day Territory Plan

How do you create a 30-60-90 day sales strategy for your target market? To use this approach to creating a sales territory plan, follow these steps to develop strategies that help build your sales pipeline:

1. Personas: Who is your perfect customer? Build out a persona that reflects all of the characteristics that you are looking for in a client, as well as the unique challenges and needs of that ideal customer.
2. SWOT analysis: Look at your team and business from a strengths and weaknesses perspective, and then evaluate the territory from an opportunities and threats standpoint. That’s the simplest way to conduct a SWOT analysis.
3. Competitive research: Who is the competition in the territory? What does your business offer that theirs does not? In other words, what is your competitive advantage?
4. Profitable accounts: Who are your top prospects? Find the accounts that can be most profitable and use them as a starting point in the territory.
5. Sales goals: Set specific goals for your team in the territory. What results will they be able to deliver? And by when?
6. KPIs: Create a dashboard that includes all of the metrics that really matter to your success in the territory — the key performance indicators.
7. Additional leads: Beyond the top prospects established in No. 4 above, what other leads look attractive?
8. Route optimization: Optimize routes for your salespeople so that they can spend more time selling and less time traveling.
9. Monthly quotas: Create monthly quotas for your representatives to hit. These quotes should derive from the information gathered in the previous steps.
10. Feedback: Get feedback from your reps on how things are going in the territory. They are on the ground in the area and should be one of your best sources of information.
11. Analytics: Look at the performance numbers. Where are you exceeding expectations? What areas need more attention?
12. Customer interviews: Talk to customers about their experience with your business and its salespeople. You can learn a lot from the people who have said “yes” to your pitch.

And then, it’s time to carry on into the future, continually optimizing and making adjustments as circumstances change. While there’s no end to the tweaks you’ll need to make to your sales territory plan, the 30-60-90 day approach accelerates your work and helps you build a viable territory as quickly as possible.

Other Sales Territory Plan Template Strategies

The 30-60-90 day approach to sales territory planning isn’t the only one available to you. You have other options you can use for your sales plan, which we explore below.

Biggest Potential

The simplest template for territory planning is looking at the biggest potential. This can include finding large metropolitan areas where prospects will be close in proximity. These areas are full of opportunity, and they allow your salespeople to maximize that opportunity by spending less time traveling and more time selling.

Internal Data

As an existing business, you likely have reams of data that can be used to create a territory plan template. Get geolocation data indicating where your existing customers are, where your latest opportunities are, and where your accounts sit in the pipeline.

The drawback to this approach is the echo-chamber effect. You’re working from your existing data, so there’s no opportunity to bring in third-party learnings that can positively impact your business.

Industry Data

Industry data can help you overcome the echo-chamber effect. Industry data that could be helpful include incorporation filings in various states, permit filings in various cities, as well as new developments in markets of interest.

The drawback to this approach is that it gives you information on areas that you’re already interested in. It cannot help you identify areas that you should be interested in.

Multiple Data Sources

There’s no shortage of data available to you. If you have time to get complex with your territory planning, you can combine your internal data and industry data with other information like census results, economic factors, consumer trends, etc.

This level of data can be incredibly insightful when planning territories, but it can also be unwieldy. You need a great deal of time and resources to properly use this approach to territory planning.

How to Use Maptive Mapping Software for Territory Planning

To properly use territory plan templates, you need technology that accelerates processes and gives you accurate data to make decisions.

At Maptive, we offer a platform that allows you to plan territories that are fully aligned with your sales goals. Our software offers a suite of tools that lets you take a data-driven approach to planning. Use Maptive in your sales process to:

• Use demographic and census data to drive decisions.
• Leverage heat mapping to identify opportunities.
• Create drive radius maps.
• Optimize multi-stop routes.
• Calculate distances.
• Put the right customers into fully optimized territories.

We’ll soon introduce a feature that allows you to automate territory creation and optimization.

Maximize your territory planning and gain more market share when you start a free Maptive trial.

Brad Crisp

Brad Crisp is the CEO at Maptive.com, based in Denver, CO and born in San Francisco, CA. He has extensive experience in Business Mapping, GIS, Data Visualization, Mapping Data Analytics and all forms of software development. His career includes Software Development and Venture Capital dating back to 1998 at businesses like Maptive, GlobalMojo (now Giving Assistant), KPG Ventures, Loopnet, NextCard, and Banking.