How to Effectively Map Your Sales Territories?
To unlock your company’s full sales potential, you need to employ effective sales territory mapping. This means increasing the number of qualified prospects that your sales reps visit. In doing so, you’ll increase the number of deals that can be closed. In other words, your team needs to spend the majority of their workday selling. This means that you need to create a plan that ensures your team is working as effectively as possible. Enter sales territory mapping.
Sales Territory Mapping
Sales territory mapping means laying out geographic areas on a map and assigning a rep to cover each one. Additionally, this technique allows you to lay out your sales targets and resources to create a strategy to reach your goals.
Dividing Territories
There are several different metrics to consider when deciding how you’re going to divide up sales territories. Some of these are:
- Amount of existing customers
- State boundaries
- Amount of prospects that meet your target demographic
- Zip codes
Effectively Mapping Sales Territories
A sales territory map shows you where your customers are located, how they are spread out across target territories, and how said territories are distributed across your team. As a result, your team will have a clear direction on who is responsible for handling specific customers and prospects.
To map a sales territory effectively, you should have a clear, actionable strategy. This strategy should dictate which customers and prospects to visit and when. As a result, you’ll conserve time and energy. To accomplish this, follow these steps:
1. Evaluate Market Data
Use your market data to create territories. Look at these like what regions are under or over-performing, where your competition is located, and what industries you’re servicing. Additionally, you should evaluate your previous sales numbers against this data. Considering these things will allow you to plan for opportunity and workload and create territories based on present and future needs.
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2. Group Customers into Segments
By grouping prospects and customers into different segments, you can evenly divide opportunities throughout each rep’s territories. You can create segments based on things like business size, industry, geographic location, target demographic, or product/service need.
3. Consider your Sales Objectives and Goals
Eventually, you’re going to use a territory map marker to map out territories, but before you do this, you need to consider your company’s sales objectives and goals. You need to ensure that the territories you make offer an equal opportunity to meet said objectives.
For instance, you should evaluate the sales volume and revenue goals and consider the number of sales needed to meet these numbers. Next, consider the typical conversion rates of your sales team, and then you can estimate how many customers they need to visit to meet the sales objectives. As a result, you can effectively divide up customers and prospects.
4. Perform a SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You should perform a SWOT analysis for each of your sales reps to determine how to divide sales territories. For example, is there a rep whose strength is large corporate clients? Or does one of your reps have a background in IT so they would do well with clients in the technology industry?
You should also do a SWOT analysis of your sales process. For example, are there any leaks in your sales pipeline? Are there areas where your resources are limited?
5. Set Your Team Up for Success
The last part of effectively mapping your sales territories is determining whether you’ve set up your sales reps for success. Therefore, you need to look at the territories you’ve created and ask:
- Does each territory offer a manageable number of accounts?
- Which territories have the highest value accounts, and is the sales rep assigned capable of handling these?
- Does each territory contain enough prospects for sales reps to achieve their goals?
- Do you know how your reps will generate new sales leads from their territories?
- Have you provided your team with the resources they need?
By asking these questions, you’ll identify any holes that need filling or issues that need addressing.
In sum, effectively mapping your sales territories involves evaluating the market, customer, and staff data to ensure you divide things up in a way that optimizes opportunities for achieving your business goals.
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