The worth of gross sales territories isn’t misplaced on most gross sales leaders (and whether it is, we’ll make clear that shortly). The issue is making your gross sales territory planning truthful with out swallowing up your time.
When you’re fed up with reps moaning in regards to the measurement or worth of their territories, then it’s time to think twice about your gross sales territory mapping technique. Keep in mind that it’s not simply the way you create territories within the first place; it’s additionally about the way you optimize your mapping over time to hit greater gross sales.
On this article, we’ll clarify why gross sales territory mapping is so necessary to get proper, find out how to create a gross sales territory map in case you don’t have one already, and find out how to optimize your territory plan.
What’s gross sales territory mapping, and why is it necessary?
Gross sales territory mapping is the method of defining the areas of your goal market that gross sales reps are chargeable for rising.
Whereas just some gross sales organizations create gross sales territories, there are many causes to take action.
Divide markets strategically
In a great world, gross sales managers would assign every account to probably the most appropriate rep. If somebody has monetary expertise, they’d be on each monetary deal. If somebody makes a speciality of enterprise gross sales, they’d be on each enterprise account.
This by no means occurs when accounts are assigned randomly, nevertheless it’s virtually a given with gross sales territory mapping. In spite of everything, you select how your market is split, and also you select which reps to assign to every territory. So everybody has the identical gross sales potential.
Create truthful territories
It’s onerous to offer your whole reps the identical chunk of the apple. However a well-defined and executed gross sales territory mapping technique ought to create truthful territories that everybody is pleased with.
By creating truthful territories, you’ll additionally enhance the effectiveness of all of your reps, enhance workforce morale, and maximize the variety of alternatives your workforce generates.
Higher handle sources
You solely have so many reps in your gross sales workforce, and people reps solely have so many hours within the day. Efficient territory mapping ensures that you simply divide your whole addressable market into buyer segments to maximise useful resource allocation.
Each rep will get a similar-sized market and sufficient alternatives to maintain them busy with out getting overwhelmed.
Maximize rep productiveness
Gross sales territories can significantly enhance gross sales productiveness by letting gross sales give attention to accounts close to or associated to one another. This makes it so much simpler to batch duties like analysis since many firms share traits.
It will possibly additionally enhance the gross sales routes of your outdoors gross sales workforce. When you’re mapping gross sales territories by geographic space (by ZIP codes), your area gross sales workforce will save quite a lot of journey time because of environment friendly route planning.
The significance of this may’t be overstated, particularly given the time-consuming nature of gross sales the place reps spend round two-thirds of their time on non-selling actions.
Find out how to map gross sales territories successfully
Observe these step-by-step directions in case you have but to create gross sales territory maps.
Outline your gross sales objectives
What are you attempting to realize with gross sales territory mapping?
Begin your gross sales territory mapping course of by setting clear objectives. Take into consideration the corporate objectives you need to accomplish in not solely the brief time period but in addition the long run.
Will your gross sales territory objectives be appropriate in a yr when the corporate has grown? Or are you going to should redo all of your onerous work?
Frequent objectives embrace:
- Rising market share in a specific area
- Launching a brand new product
- Rising gross sales
As soon as you recognize your objectives, you may create gross sales territories that align with them.
On the identical time, create gross sales targets to trace your efficiency. These could possibly be revenue-based (the pipeline worth of every market, the worth of closed offers, and so on.) or activity-based (variety of offers in your pipeline, variety of conferences booked, and so on.).
Perceive your finest consumers
Whereas gross sales territory mapping is about dividing your audience by a number of traits, you’ll nonetheless need to make sure that goal accounts are price your rep’s time. As a rule, which means ensuring they appear like your present finest consumers.
An splendid buyer profile (ICP) is a quantitative breakdown of your prime accounts by firmographic and demographic information indicators. These indicators are traits like the corporate’s business, measurement, and income and you’ll find all of them in your CRM information. Creating a number of ICPs is the easiest way to make sure goal accounts are worthwhile.
Regardless of the attribute you finally use to create your gross sales territories, there will probably be dozens of various kinds of firms to focus on. By creating an ICP, you give your reps an excellent tighter transient, permitting them to disregard the entire different kinds of firms they might goal of their space and give attention to those which can be anticipated to ship one of the best long-term worth on your firm.
An ICP will even let your reps qualify accounts sooner and sharpen their messaging in order that it’s virtually sure to land with potential prospects. In brief, reps can change into much more efficient and productive.
Contain your gross sales reps
Contain your gross sales reps at each stage of the method when creating gross sales territories. They may finally be chargeable for promoting into these markets, so that you need them to be pleased with the way you create them.
Particularly, it’s important to play to your reps’ strengths and weaknesses.
Use a SWOT evaluation to interrupt down the strengths, weaknesses, alternatives, and threats of your reps and potential markets.
As an illustration, perhaps one rep has quite a lot of expertise with one business however no expertise in one other. Or perhaps there’s a big competitor in a single territory — the sort that requires an skilled gross sales rep to compete towards.
The higher you perceive your workforce, the simpler it will likely be to assign new territories that align along with your gross sales reps’ strengths.
As an illustration, you wouldn’t need to assign a gross sales rep to a world market in the event that they don’t converse the native language. Equally, you’d need to assign a specific business to a gross sales rep in the event that they’ve labored in that house earlier than.
Create and assign gross sales territories
Previously, gross sales territories meant utilizing geographic information to create bodily territories — the areas of a map for which every area gross sales rep was accountable. This methodology doesn’t work for a lot of B2B firms, particularly ones that promote software program to firms based totally on both the East or West Coast.
As an alternative, think about using one of many following traits for territory design:
- Space
- Product
- Purchaser sort
- Gross sales channel
- Deal worth
You might even need to use a number of traits to create territories in case you are an enterprise firm with an enormous addressable market. As an illustration, you may create territories by area (North America, EMEA, Asia, and so on.) after which divide every of these territories by purchaser sort.
Whichever methodology you select, guarantee that your territories are divided in a means that helps you obtain the objectives you outlined at first of this course of.
Traditionally, gross sales reps have executed territory mapping utilizing spreadsheets or bodily maps. Whereas each of those devices are nonetheless frequent in some gross sales organizations, they’re inefficient.
At this time, it’s extra frequent for gross sales groups to place apart their Salesforce CRM and use interactive gross sales territory mapping software program to create and assign maps for gross sales territories.
Gross sales territory mapping doesn’t simply make it simple so that you can create balanced territories — you can even use gross sales territory mapping software program to measure rep efficiency, generate insights, create gross sales studies, and forestall gross sales information from getting siloed.
Most gross sales territory mapping options come as standalone software program platforms. Well-liked gross sales mapping instruments embrace Maptive, Gross sales Badger, and Spotio. Maptive, for instance, is powered by Google Maps and it affords free territory plan templates you need to use.
Find out how to optimize your gross sales territory maps
Periodic opinions are important to maintain your gross sales territory mapping truthful and worthwhile. The very last thing you need is on your gross sales representatives to begin churning as a result of they’re not getting the identical fee alternatives as reps with higher territories.
Analyze rep efficiency
Do you continue to have the best workforce members assigned to every territory? Is one salesperson struggling to deal with a territory on their very own?
These questions require you to trace gross sales KPIs to research your reps’ efficiency and decide the success of your gross sales technique.
You should utilize the KPIs listed under to gauge rep efficiency. Ideally, you need to see reps excel in methods they didn’t earlier than you created the gross sales territories. In different phrases, you need to see them progress over time.
You’ll additionally need to overview your workforce’s sources. Are gross sales reps in some markets overwhelmed whereas others wrestle to fulfill their quotas?
As markets change and develop, you might be required to redistribute reps between markets, alter the scale of every territory, or just rent extra reps to proceed to extend gross sales. You might even must reassign a gross sales rep’s territories altogether.
Analyze market efficiency
Use present and historic information to trace gross sales territories’ well being. Ideally, you need every territory to supply the identical caliber of accounts. Nonetheless, if one market is persistently producing higher-value accounts, you might must revise your present territories accordingly.
Buyer success KPIs are among the best strategies for analyzing the market efficiency of every territory.
These are KPIs that analyze the standard of the accounts your reps shut. As an illustration, a persistently excessive quarterly renewed ARR means consumers proceed to make use of your product. Excessive upsell and cross-sell charges imply there is a chance to develop accounts even when they’ve been closed.
You possibly can observe these metrics on your whole gross sales pipeline, however the actual worth is available in measuring these KPIs in every gross sales territory. That means, you may see which territories outperform others and whether or not assigning extra reps to high-value territories could also be helpful.
Forecast future gross sales
It’s not simply present and historic information try to be utilizing to optimize gross sales territories. Trying into your crystal ball and forecasting future gross sales is equally necessary.
Have territories modified in worth? Are they prone to change sooner or later? Use gross sales forecasting to evaluate market potential when gross sales planning.
Reasonably than utilizing a gross sales forecasting methodology that depends on historic information, we’d suggest utilizing one based mostly in your gross sales cycle or alternative stage likelihood to evaluate the potential of territories going ahead.
Use software program
Gross sales territory mapping software program isn’t simply efficient for creating gross sales territories — you can even use it for gross sales territory administration and to optimize every territory transferring ahead.
Most platforms provide performance like real-time insights that make it simple to establish and proper points earlier than they begin impacting gross sales or workforce morale. And if these points require territories to be realigned, you are able to do this simply utilizing gross sales territory mapping software program.
Whereas a gross sales territory mapping instrument is helpful for the continuing administration and optimization of gross sales territories, a income administration platform like Gong may help you observe the well being of your pipeline and drill down into gross sales efficiency by rep and account sort.
Optimize your gross sales territories with Gong
It’s not troublesome to divide your purchaser base into completely different gross sales territories. What’s onerous is retaining these territories truthful years after they have been created. An efficient gross sales territory mapping technique is as a lot about ongoing optimization as it’s in regards to the preliminary creation.
That’s the place a gross sales automation instrument like Gong is available in.
With Gong, you may regulate how your gross sales reps carry out in every territory. You can too use our software program to trace every market’s efficiency, establish points, and optimize them as wanted. Ebook a demo as we speak to seek out out extra.