Driving Business Growth With Agile Sales Territory Mapping

Driving Business Growth With Agile Sales Territory Mapping

Most sales leaders are all too familiar with the process of blowing up and reassembling sales territories every three or four years. The need for realignment is usually obvious, but the process of change is often disruptive to both operations and the carefully developed relationships between a sales team and its customers. Large-scale changes can erode trust between the company and its customers — but also with employees.

Fortunately, there is a better way.

Agile sales mapping can provide the flexibility needed to respond to rapid market changes without disrupting your efforts. However, to effectively map sales territories, there are a few steps you’ll need to take.

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Adapting to Changes in the Market

Before we get into the details of sales territory planning, it’s important to understand the landscape in which we operate.

Today, the market shifts faster than ever, with businesses popping up and falling at a rate never seen before. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 65% of new businesses fail during the first 10 years. Meanwhile, for the companies that do survive, the average age (based on the S&P 500) is under 20 years — down from 60 years in the 1950s.

This high level of churn creates a significant imbalance in sales territories far faster than in the past. While traditional redesign initiatives remain effective, they only offer a short-term solution. Account populations, sizes, importance and complexity are also changing within and across territory boundaries more quickly, along with resource requirements and the optimal approach to service.

For instance, one of our clients in the tech sector reported, “As we work on establishing fair boundaries and rules of engagement between sales teams, we’re having real difficulty managing subsidiary accounts in our mid-size customer segment that roll up into larger enterprise customers.”

All of this can have serious implications for salespeople, impacting everything from productivity and efficiency to territory performance.

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What Agile Sales Territory Design & Management Can Do for Your Business

As the market shifts, account priorities often stay unchanged, with growing accounts getting less attention than they should and diminishing accounts receiving too much investment. Salespeople tend to call accounts where they know they’re welcome and have a good relationship, versus accounts with an existing opportunity to grow.

This misalignment between customer needs and sales efforts can lead to several challenges, including:

• Territories growing or declining at a high rate in either dollars or number of accounts. This often means workloads are also changing dramatically, making some territories less serviceable than others.
  
• Greater distribution of account size or sales potential within one or more territories, leading to difficulties in prioritizing smaller accounts that may be better served by inside selling resources.
  
• Goals are increasingly difficult to set as territory fundamentals shift and reps with great sales performance turnover at higher rates.

To address these issues, you need an agile strategy that uses real-time data and market conditions to continuously inform and map sales territories. This approach ensures your efforts are aligned with emerging opportunities and customer needs.

By leveraging advanced analytics and sales mapping software, companies can create dynamic maps that reflect current market realities, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively. Not only does this enhance sales productivity, but it also helps maintain balanced workloads for each sales rep, reducing the risk of burnout and turnover.

An agile sales territory design also enables more precise sales planning and forecasting, allowing managers to set realistic quotas that align with broader business objectives. But how can you design your own?

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4 Steps for Designing a Sales Territory Map To Align With Business Objectives

Here are the four steps for building an agile territory map:

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1. Start With Principles

Applying a principle-based approach is key. Establishing commonly held objectives provides the foundation for every decision related to territory design downstream. Principles of agile design might include elements such as:

• ‍Focusing on the role, not the person: This ensures consistency and objectivity, making it easier to adapt as personnel changes. It also means setting clear expectations and sales targets that align with the company’s overall strategy, ensuring each sales rep can unlock their true potential.
• ‍Moving goals with the account: Sales goals should be fluid and move with accounts to ensure continuity and better customer service. This approach maintains momentum and ensures that targets are relevant and achievable.
• ‍Maximizing time spent on high-value sales efforts: To boost productivity, it’s important to design territories such that salespeople spend more time on high-value activities. Whether it’s optimizing sales routes, or focusing on accounts with the highest potential, the goal is to prioritize efforts that drive the most value.
• ‍Ensuring territories can be served effectively by one person: Each territory should be manageable by a single sales rep to ensure accountability and streamlined operations. This requires careful planning and a balanced distribution of accounts to prevent overburdening one individual.
• ‍Balancing sales opportunities across territories: Ensure that your sales opportunities are evenly distributed across all territories to prevent disparities both in potential earnings and workloads. This involves using sales data and market analysis to balance boundaries for a fair yet competitive environment.

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2. Engaging Resident Knowledge

Engaging front-line staff and sales managers in building the initial design will kickstart the crucial change management process. Their input ensures the process withstands scrutiny, leveraging valuable on-the-ground intelligence to shape the initial iteration of territory planning.

Securing their involvement will also ensure their support for the actions that come later and all along the change journey. Once the design team agrees on the methodology, it’s easy to dispel any perceptions that valued accounts will be unfairly reassigned or that changes in goals don’t accurately reflect changes in opportunity.

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3. Building the Team

It's important to create a simple process and set of rules for account changes that can be easily understood and followed.

Sales Operations typically develop and manage these processes, but in the real world, not every decision is straightforward. It's a good practice to identify a moderator or small committee that can resolve issues that come up to ensure fast and efficient decision-making.

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4. Designing and Executing the Process

Now that the foundation is set, it’s time to get to work.

Required activities include:

• ‍Building a consistent measurement approach: Develop a consistent approach to ensure complete, accurate and trusted measurements. It helps to use sales mapping software to track and analyze sales data. With real-time insights into your territories, this approach helps maintain a continuous flow of accurate information and enhances sales efficiency.
• ‍Continuously updating assumptions: Regularly review and update assumptions around account segments, sizes and service needs to reflect the latest market dynamics. This practice ensures that sales territory planning remains relevant and responsive to evolving conditions.
• ‍Developing guidelines for account management: Create clear guidelines that govern how and when accounts are identified, moved, or reassigned. These guidelines should incorporate inputs from sales mapping software and sales data analysis to ensure fair and strategic account distribution.
• ‍Designing a methodology for workload management: Establish a clear process for recalculating and comparing workloads between territories. Regularly assessing workloads can help maintain balance and ensure optimal resource allocation.
• ‍Providing latitude for leaders to make the right call: It’s important that leaders get some discretion when it comes to making decisions where standard rules don’t apply. This flexibility is crucial for addressing unique situations that may arise in field sales.

With optimized resource allocation and enhanced sales performance, these practices ensure your team is always aligned with market opportunities.

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Plot Your Path to Sales Success

Ready to see an agile sales territory strategy in action?

Discover how RevenueShift's expertise drove a 15% reduction in compensation costs and a 3% boost in sales growth. Read the case study here.

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