Defining sales territory and allocating it to sales team members or representatives is the goal of every company to maximize the time spend on the ground by sales personnel. Territory mapping is crucial to ensure that the sales team canvasses in the right area instead of moving around aimlessly. When sales representatives have territories defined, they know precisely what to focus upon. They can work on the demographic components to boost their selling efforts so that they get the most out of their day. Dividing a bigger sales area into smaller segments and assigning each area to a specific salesperson or group gives a clear picture of the target area and its prospective customers. It helps them in planning the right sales strategies. Most importantly it eliminates the chances of salespersons overlapping and encroaching into others territory.
Balancing the workload of salespersons is one of the benefits of sales territory mapping. It acts as an incentive because it gives them the opportunity of improving their earning potential and the company’s revenue. Designing the territory ensures that all territories get equal coverage, and it optimizes the workforce without the need of adding more representatives.
The task of mapping sales territory is tedious, and doing it manually by highlighting areas on a map is prone to mistakes and creates confusion. Although it helps to define broad territorial boundaries, it does not help in micromanaging sales campaigns. You cannot know how many homes you are assigning or how many customers you have in that territory. It hinders the evaluation of the performance of sales personnel and weakens sales performance management. To overcome the problem and make the process of territory mapping more accurate and precise, organizations are using territory mapping software that enables better sales management and improve sales force productivity.
Strong sales plans emanate from fair and balanced sales territories, but you need to know the elements that help to build successful sales territory maps. How to approach territory mapping to make it most effective is what you will come to know about from this article.
Customer segmentation with the right data insights
For developing an effective map of sales territory, you must know where you stand currently with respect to your clients, prospects, and leads. It provides the foundation for creating customer segments based on location, purchase history, verticals, spend, demographics and any other critical sales parameter. Sales mapping software allows you to integrate third-party data such as population trends, vertical data, as well as a number of hospital beds in your territory derived from your CRM data. By assimilating all such information, you should be able to focus on the most prospective verticals by knowing their location and their purchasing behavior.
How much effort you need to put in to motivate customers to make a purchase becomes clear by analyzing the data related to any customer segment. You can group the top customers according to the common characteristics. The software helps to visualize data that offers more insights and helps to grab opportunities.
Set goals and targets
Along with creating the territory map, you must set up clear goals and guidelines that are easy to track and measure. By following some of the best practices in mapping, it becomes easy to identify targets and work towards achieving them. You must identify the locations that generate maximum leads and be aware of the geographical areas that need more attention. Next, you must consider the number of reps you need to assign to each territory. Have a clear idea about products and services that are in high demand, together with those that are most profitable. You must also be able to identify the customer segments that generate the highest revenue.
Having gathered information in all these areas, you get a clear picture of what kind of objectives to set for each territory.
Create quantifiable strategies
Once you set clear goals for each territory, it is time to create strategies for achieving the goals. While allocating territories, you must be careful to ensure even distribution of representatives in the territories to remove any bias. However, the skill sets of representatives must match with the type of territory you assign to them. If you have representatives who are influential in any particular area, you should assign those accounts to them, and the software should help you tremendously in mapping the territories.
Knowing what you need helps you in developing strategies, and you must consider what resources your team needs to achieve the goals. Think about ways of increasing conversions in each territory and consider if there are any opportunities in under-served areas. Strategies for different areas can be different, and the mapping software can help by displaying demographic data on a map that lists hot and cold opportunities.
Keep the territories balanced
You must continuously keep balancing your territories as the market and demographics keep changing. The changing dynamics influence how the territories respond to your strategies and goals. Balancing territories is vital for allowing sales representatives to take advantage of the potential business opportunities within the geographical area. Unfair distribution of territories can be a cause of discontent among the sales representatives, which can lead to attrition and affect the business adversely. By using third-party data intelligence that is within the scope of the mapping software and combining it with geographical data, it becomes easy to balance territories most logically.
Tangible results
Having created territory maps backed by goals and strategies, you are now ready to drive the campaign in the right direction, but it is essential to monitor progress. How the territories affect sales must be the prime consideration when evaluating performance. Tracking should help to understand if there are any significant disparities between territories, whether sales have increased in new territories, whether there are underserved markets and identify territories where sales representatives are struggling to keep up with leads. Based on the findings, you can modify or create new territories or change your tactics.
Territory maps can increase sales efficiencies and the productivity of sales representatives, and, naturally, companies are becoming more reliant on it.
