The Importance of Territory Planning, Maximising Efficiency & Driving Growth by Assigned Territories

Your sales strategy will always be more effective when members of your sales team are fully informed about which customer territories they should pursue. At Simplified Revenue Operations, we’ll use your underutilised data to inform effective territory planning which can ensure that’s the case. But what exactly is territory planning, and why is it so important for your bottom line?

What is Territory Planning?

Territory planning is simply the process by which organisations divide their prospects and customers, or ‘territories’ between their sales teams. This ensures that everyone in your team is always aware of who they should be selling to, and who their colleagues are targeting. 

It’s easy to assume that territory planning is particularly concerned with geographic components. In reality, though, geography is just one part of the puzzle. More often, territories simply refer to collections of named client accounts, both past and present. Effective territory planning may also centre around whichever territories can most effectively optimise sales, whether that’s geographical regions, customer segments, or historical results. 

Within these clearly defined territories, sales teams can ensure a far more strategic allocation of sales resources. Most commonly, this will include increasing their presence in under-covered territories or, pulling back in oversaturated markets where the same people are being approached time and again. 

Why Do Organisations Need A Sales Territory Strategy?

Without a clear territory planning strategy, your sales team is at risk of lacking purpose, approaching the same audiences, and ultimately failing to perform. This is ineffective, and it’s not exactly great for motivation as your team members are far more likely to experience frustration, or even conflicts when they go after the same accounts. 

For your customers, being approached by different members of a structureless sales team that’s double compensating sales is also frustrating, and suggests a real lack of professionalism. 

By being diligent about their sales territory strategy based on the existing data and documentation we work with here at Simplified Revenue Operations, organisations can be far more certain of increased sales efficiency. By ensuring that none of your team members attempt to broach the same territories, the structure provided by a territory planning strategy from Simplified Revenue Operations can also increase customer coverage, and even reveal brand-new market territories that would’ve been impossible to identify otherwise. 

Specific sales professionals can then approach those territories with a tailored pitch in mind, while also promising dedicated account handling that enhances customer satisfaction and retention. That can help with everything from customer lifetime value (CLV) to net promoter scores (NPS) and other key performance indicators (KPIs). 

The Benefits of Territory Planning With Simplified Revenue Operations

There are countless benefits to effective territory planning with the help of our expert team, the most obvious of which include :

• Increased sales efficiency: Informed territory planning can ensure a streamlined, segmented sales approach that identifies both under and over-served territories for future improvements.
  
• Ensures balanced workloads: By spreading workloads evenly across your sales team, territory planning reduces costly issues like conflict and double compensating sales. Instead, each member of your team will always work towards a different sales goal..
  
• Drives focus on high-potential areas: Territory planning makes it possible to dedicate particular members of your team, and generally align your resources, towards high-potential sales areas that you may otherwise underserve.
  
• Maximises ROI on sales efforts: Territory planning ensures you’re not retargeting the same customers, or targeting customers who don’t have any incentive to buy. As a result, your informed sales efforts are more likely to result in high ROIs.
  
• Provides a basis for performance analysis: When your sales team are all working towards different goals, it’s far easier to measure individual performance, and to provide recognition. This can result in far healthier competition between team members, and ensures you’re always praising individual efforts. 

The Challenges of Territory Planning

Without help from professionals like our team here at Simplified Revenue Operations, companies who are new to territory planning are at risk of facing challenges that may include : 

• Obstacles in territory allocation: Issues like failing to balance allocated territories based on potential or workload, and also ineffective resource allocation for each territory, can exacerbate dissatisfaction and rivalry within a sales team.
  
• A failure to remain flexible: Resistance to changes in each territory can result in outdated methods or ineffective sales techniques.
  
• A lack of real-time data: Without real-time data, it’s impossible to effectively identify and monitor territories, or strategically allocate sales resources like budgets, sales incentives, and so on.

How We Build Your Sales Territory Plan

At Simplified Revenue Operations, we’re dedicated to helping you develop the best possible territory plan, based on verifiable data from every department within your company. Whether you’ve already got an ineffective territory plan in place or have never tried territory planning before, we'll help you by 

Analysing Your Business Goals and Objectives

Your sales territory plan requires clarity about everything from your current organisational goals to your sales history and any industry trends. By collecting company-wide data about various territory components (eg. geographic, customer segment or product verticals), and showing you how to use it, we can paint a clear picture of where you are right now, and the changes necessary to get where you want to be with territory planning. 

Analysing Your Prospects and Customers

We don’t just consider your wants, we also analyse your reality. By monitoring real-time documentation from marketing through to sales, we can analyse your existing audiences, as well as any neglected prospects within your total addressable market (TAM). This makes it easier to develop an informed, rounded territory plan with the best potential possible. 

Devising a Plan of Action

Once we have a good idea of your sales territories based on KPIs and customer metrics, we’ll help you devise an action plan that puts those findings directly into your sales funnel. This will include determining a quota, pipeline, and goals for each territory, as well as understanding which members of your sales team are best suited to each segment. Even once your territory plan is up and running, we’ll make it easier for you to stay adaptable with ongoing tracking, and immediate professional resolution for any changes you need to make to your territory plan along the way.