Sales territories outgrow their existing boundaries all the time. It’s only natural when you’re selling for a company that’s rapidly growing.
When your current boundaries are no longer cutting it, it’s time to reevaluate the structure of your team and how to best serve your clients. The hard part, though, is knowing where to start.
That’s where sales territory mapping software like Maptive comes into play. Maptive can help you visualize and analyze data in new and fresh ways, which makes it easy to see how adjustments to territory structure can maximize your efforts and benefit your team.
Perhaps you know about sales territory optimization but have never had the chance to go through a territory planning exercise at a growing organization. Or perhaps the concept of sales territory optimization is new to you. Either way, here’s a deep dive into sales territory optimization and the five benefits optimization delivers for your team and your business.
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A lot goes into territory planning. Leaders must evaluate the opportunity present in any prospective territory. And then, they must also align that opportunity with the number of sales reps and individual workloads to create the best results and maximize sales productivity.
You have two options for territory management. First, you can attempt to create optimized sales territories by hand. The manual approach tends to be time-consuming, and it rarely leads to full optimization. Second, you can choose to create territories with assistance from an automated tool.
If you’re wondering how to optimize sales territories, which approach do you think is best? As you might imagine, most businesses choose a tool that can automate the sales territory optimization process. Using a tool is the fastest and most accurate way to create the needed alignment between opportunity, resources, and individual workloads. This approach to territory management also saves any organization time and money.
Let’s touch on the specific benefits of effective sales territory optimization as empowered by an automated tool like Maptive. When you consider these five benefits, you’ll discover that the decision to use technology for optimization is one of the easiest a sales leader will face — one that can dramatically increase sales performance.
As you can imagine, the primary benefit of sales territory optimization is increased revenue. Research indicates that optimizing territory design without making any other changes can drive a 2% to 7% increase in sales. But what are the specific ways that optimization helps drive revenue growth?
First, effective territory design balances the workload among your representatives. When sales managers optimize territories, they eliminate coverage gaps and give sales reps enough time to look after their customers and prospects properly. When customers and prospects feel cared for, the organization closes more deals, enjoys more upsells, receives better reviews, increases referrals — and ultimately boosts revenue.
Optimized territories have other benefits, but revenue is the game’s name. Increased revenue alone should be enough to inspire sales leaders to explore optimization and the tools needed to do it accurately and effectively.
As you increase revenue due to optimized sales territories, wouldn’t it be nice to balance that growth by lowering costs? Sales resources are precious, and you always want to make the most of them. Effective territory optimization can help you do just that.
Markets are constantly changing for sales organizations, which can make it difficult to assign the right number of people to each territory. Things happen. For example, new competitors emerge, demand changes, customers churn, etc. Those things affect the number of reps you should have serving any given territory to maximize sales performance.
As mentioned above, you have two options for right-sizing your sales force in a territory management exercise. First, you can try to optimize by hand, keeping tabs on the changing landscape and guessing at how that should influence territory design. Or, you can use an automated tool to consistently and effectively tweak your territories and right-size your number of reps in each. When you right-size your sales force across territories, the cost of that sales force plummets.
You know the saying, “time is money.” Well, it turns out that it’s true regarding sales organizations and their territories.
Territory management is always tough, but one of the biggest challenges sales managers face is creating geographically optimized and realistic territories in terms of travel time. If a territory is too large, it will take too long for a sales representative to get from one customer to the next. On the other hand, if a territory is too small, there won’t be enough potential customers to justify the time and expense of having a sales rep in that area.
The key is finding the right balance between these two factors. Fortunately, there are now sales territory mapping software options that can help with this task by creating geographically optimized and realistic territories in terms of travel time — programs like Maptive. These tools allow sales leaders to save time for any rep by optimizing the size of each territory.
As anyone who has ever worked in sales knows, the job can be grueling. Reps spend long days driving from client to client, prospect to prospect. The experience can lead to burnout across your sales force.
Turnover will always be a challenge facing sales organizations. But optimized sales territories can help mitigate your burnout rate.
How does it work? Start by placing the ideal amount of salespeople in a market. Then, evenly divide the market so that everyone is pursuing an equal opportunity. No one gets so overwhelmed that they can’t keep up, and no one is wasting away in a territory without a real opportunity to earn.
Some organizations choose a different approach, creating territories of uniform size regardless of the opportunity within each. These organizations that choose to not optimize their territories for opportunity experience 14% less quota attainment than those that do.
Fair sales territories help balance each rep’s workload while giving everyone the opportunity to excel.
As a sales manager, you know that one of the most important things you can do is to help your sales team build strong relationships with their customers. But, when you have a large sales territory and a lot on your plate, effective customer relationship management can be tough.
However, by combining your territory planning with your customer service goals, you can make it easier for your sales reps to provide a high level of customer service that will keep your customers coming back. Effective optimization means less time spent on administrative tasks in a territory that’s too large — and more time spent effectively serving existing clients and prospects alike.
Are you ready to unlock the benefits of automated sales territory optimization? Maptive is here to help enhance your sales operations.
Maptive is a platform that can transform your data into an optimized Google Map in just minutes. Take advantage of tools like Maptive’s Territory Map Maker, allowing users to quickly map out client locations, create drive-time maps, generate optimized routes for salespeople, and more. Also, Maptive will soon launch an Automated Territory Optimization tool.
You can use Maptive’s rich feature set to build and optimize sales territories that will maximize your team’s efforts. And, as you need to re-evaluate your territories in the face of changing circumstances, you can return to Maptive again and again for real-time territory planning.
Start a free trial and begin creating an optimized sales territory plan. Your sales reps will thank you for it.
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.
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