The Ultimate Guide to Effective Sales Territory Management

Are you making the most of your sales territories?

With proper management, sales territories are an essential aspect of peak business performance, generating maximum revenue, enabling you to deliver efficient and excellent customer service, and keeping your sales team aligned—and happy.

Sales territory management, therefore, is key. And while it requires many moving parts—a thorough analysis of your customers, markets, and sales teams, as well as execution and adaptation, powerful software like Maptive makes sales territory management a breeze.

In this article, we’ll discuss the elements of effective sales territory management, how to execute it flawlessly, and the tools that are available to help you best manage your sales territories.

What is Sales Territory Management?

Sales territory management is the ongoing practice of analyzing and optimizing each territory in your market to maximize sales. Businesses that successfully manage their territories earn more revenue, build better relationships with their customers, and get the most out of their sales team.

What Are the Benefits of Sales Territory Management?

Effective territory management can do even more than help your business achieve its optimal, most profitable sales process. The best sales territory plans provide a whole host of benefits, including:

• Reduced Travel Time and Expenses: Time is money. Efficiently optimized territories give your salespeople more time to call accounts, nurture leads, and maximize relationships—and less time, and fuel, wasted on the road.
• Improved Customer Service: What’s the best way to earn more sales? Grow your existing accounts. Effective sales territory management makes sure your customers get the attention they deserve, along with the sales rep that will serve them best.
• Better Targeting: Sales and marketing are most effective when highly targeted. With fine-tuned sales territory management, you gain the laser-targeted demographic data you need to put the right sales message in front of the right customers.
• Minimize Employee Turnover: When your sales reps are making quota while calling clients they connect with, everyone wins. Sales territory management puts your reps in a position of success, boosting each territory’s sales while preventing expensive and tedious tasks like hiring, onboarding, and training.

How to Manage a Sales Territory

With upside so high for your team, market, and bottom-line, you may be asking yourself, “What does sales territory management look like for my business? And what do I need to do?”

 At Maptive, our customers take these sales territory management steps to increase revenue, customer satisfaction, and employee retention:

 Start With Your End Goals: What is your sales team’s long term plan? What, exactly, defines success for your organization? What are your organization’s future plans? The best sales territory management strategies start here. Look at your big picture vision, define your key performance indicators (KPIs), and determine where you want to be.

1. Conduct Market Research: Now that you know what you want, discover how your market will help you get there. Market research will help you find your highest-upside territories, leads, and prospects—including demographics, as well as the most cost-effective, profitable, and probable way to win business.
2. Evaluate Your Team: Each territory is made up of a unique blend of account sizes, industry verticals, deal sizes, and other business-defining factors. Therefore, sales territory management is also about assignment: finding the right fit between your goals, territories, and sales reps.
3. Set Short-Term, Measurable Goals: Yearly, monthly, weekly, and even daily sales goals keep your sales team aligned with your big picture vision. In addition to quotas, measure closing ratios, call targets, and other factors that keep your sales team motivated and revenue growing.
4. Upload Your Customer Data to a Mapping Software: CRM, demographic, sales, and other data will help you identify your profit centers, spot opportunities for growth, and visualize your market. Sales mapping software like Maptive helps enterprises design sales routes, discover opportunities in real-time, and make the necessary pivots to achieve their goals.
5. Create Routes That Will Help Your Business and Sales Team Succeed: With detailed data, market research, goals, and crystal-clear evaluations of your sales team members, you’re now able to create optimized, efficient, and balanced sales territories. Maptive features a range of powerful tools that will make sure your sales territories strike that perfect balance between business goals, customer retention, and sales team morale. The key here is to make sure each rep receives a manageable and relatively equal workload built to their strengths.
6. Adapt as Necessary: Even the best plans benefit from a little pivoting. Sales territory management doesn’t end when you make your routes. It ends—and starts all over again—when you achieve your sales goals. Respond to customer feedback, your salesperson’s notes, and KPIs with real-time pivots. A simple reorganization of a route, reassignment of a sales rep, and other adaptations can mean major results. The best sales mapping software gives you the tools to execute any action that will improve your bottom line.

Factors to Consider When Making Sales Territory Assignments

The most effective sales territory management uses data to gain insights and analysis on a distinctly human element of business: relationships. At heart, sales territories are defined by the people that run them, and the companies that can optimize territories for better relationships win.

If relationships are half the battle, then it’s imperative to assign the right reps to the right territories. Consider these factors when making management and assignment decisions:

• Customer Location: Which reps will be most accessible to your customers? Which routes are the most efficient?
• Account Size: How much time will the account require? Which reps are best equipped to manage accounts of its size?
• Sales Ability: Which sales rep will give the territory the best chance to succeed?
• Opportunity: Which reps will thrive here? Will they have the opportunity to grow here?

 The flip side? Your sales rep’s relationships with your organization, and each other, are equally important. When making assignments, remember the internal elements at play, too.  Consider these factors to keep your territories humming and sales team happy:

• Balance: Do your territories contain relatively the same number of accounts and prospects? Does everyone on your sales team have an equal opportunity to succeed?
• Distribution: Are your territories distributed well enough to give your customers proper attention while keeping your reps from burning out?
• Motivation: Can your reps reasonably achieve their sales goals in their territories? Are there enough leads and prospects to keep them engaged?

Maptive Makes Sales Territory Management Easy

The right data, when visualized, makes sales territory management seamless. It defines your territories, creates highly-efficient routes, and helps you identify opportunities for growth, adaptation, and likely sales—from a macro- and micro-perspective.

Mapping software like Maptive is ideal for sales territory management. By plotting the locations of your customers, accounts, salespeople, and offices, you’ll have all the information you need to create the perfect territories for your business.

Here’s how Maptive helps you with sales territory management:

• Easily Plot Location-Based Data: Plot addresses and CRM data onto an interactive sales territory map in seconds.
• Create and Visualize Territories: Maptive’s Geographic Boundary Territory Tool allows you to create territories based on zip codes, counties, states, and other established geographical regions.
• Gain Full Customization of Your Territories: Draw custom boundaries based on the distribution of your customers and salespeople with Maptive’s Drawing Tool.
• Identify Successes and Opportunities with Heat Maps: Identify your market’s highest concentration of sales, regions that need improvement, untapped markets, and new opportunities.
• Filter Your Data for Clearer Insights: Maptive’s filter tool hides inapplicable data points with the click of a button, allowing you to only focus on the most important information.
• Optimize Your Sales Routes: Increase your sales opportunities and decrease travel time while improving efficiency. Maptive’s Multi-Stop Route Planner and Optimization Tool determines the quickest route between your sales teams and their customers.
• Share Routes With Your Team: Maptive’s flexible sharing options allow your sales team to receive routes in their favorite format. Upload routes to a website, send your sales team a link to your map, print off an image, or export data to a spreadsheet.
• Access Your Map Anywhere from the Cloud: Supporting any device with an internet connection, Maptive’s cloud-based service allows your team to access your sales territory maps from anywhere. Even better? Changes you make in the field or the office are instantly viewable by your entire team.

Take Your Sales Territory Management to the Next Level Today

Sales territory management is the bridge between where your sales are and where they want to be. With effective sales territory management, you increase sales across every territory market while building your customer relationships and improving the livelihoods—and wellbeing—of your sales team.

Your business can achieve its sales goals with a clear territory management process. Comprehensive-yet-intuitive sales software mapping tools like Maptive make it easy. Transforming your existing data with a full suite of powerful tools, and providing you the customization, flexibility, and connectivity you need to get what you want faster, Maptive is the most effective tool for building and managing your sales territories.

Ready to build your sales territories? Sign up for a free trial of Maptive today to start your sales territory management process. Turn your data into actionable insights, in-the-field performance, and revenue.

Start Mapping Now