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Field territory maps, field sales planning, and sales territory mapping software are not something that's new, but those jet-lagged souls who travel every day to various locales, cities and zones, need haptic to co-ordinate sales.

Basic Terminology

Before we set out to explore this vast strategy in sales, let’s establish basic terminology which will make it easier to grasp concepts:

  • Territory: A territory in sales is a marked geographical area assigned to one or more sales personnel where they will prospect and sell.
  • Account: An account refers to a paying customer assigned to teams responsible for following up and managing the business’s sales association with each of them
  • Lead: A lead in sales is someone who hasn’t as yet qualified as a good prospect to besold to, but is a potential opportunity.

Dramatically increase sales with territory mapping

If you are in sales, and planning out a travel in advance, maximize your productivity with a good planner out on for the road. Over the years, there have been many companies working to perfect sales territory mapping.  There have been dramatic changes in how sales have adopted technology and opportunities like SaaS has converged gaps and remarkable new opportunities for an average salesperson has opened up.

Till pre-2010, most sales teams used to carry bulky devices to map field sales. In stark contrast to the convergence today mobile devices that come enabled GPS has changed how business is done in real-time. Today visibly, field sales are able to quickly access all kinds of relevant pre-sales information on prospects & even work on deal-flow anywhere on the move. A salesperson has sales routes with prospect's locations fingertips in real-time as they are reaching out to customers.

With the advent of cloud, its easy collaboration between sales closers, regardless of how far they are posted. Efficiency improves even more when a good mapping solution. SaaS and 5G - The advent of these two developments is that sales territory mapping is now a game-changing tool for the startups which adopt it. It's no longer feasible for serious businesses to ignore the possibilities of not implementing sales territory mapping software for their teams traveling out open for a field call. Pre-sales can collborate with on-field sales mavericks, sharing information which enables quick follow-ups to user's queries enabling them speed-up process of closing a sale.  

Maximizing Customer Face-Time

Let your sales spend more time in front of prospects. Let sales spend very less time packing their bags, and driving around locations, trying to find their next location they're meant to call on. As prospects keep discussing their plans, mapping software makes it easy to identify the most efficient routes based on many suggestive algorithms. This means your representative's time is saved greatly!

What's more, your pre-sales team at office will be better be able to co-ordinate and discuss changes easily with people on-field, helping with their last minute route changes in real-time. Modern sales territory mapping allows sales managers monitor and approve itenary, budgets and options to their routes, and track precisely where each representative transits.

What's more challenging in travel is optimization -- survivability of any business relies on highly efficient sales planning, cutting down costs. The greatest attributes a sales go-getter looks is mostly on streamlining operations. Territory mapping is changing how supply versus demand is ascertained, and improve the hassle in travel and greatly increase profits. It's a great win-win for both the remote sales team and startup to profit from implementing software that cuts slack for direct sales.

It is also a great cost-cutting methodology for companies to gain from what others competitors have lost. Technology adoption creates an atmosphere of confidence among your direct sales team. The big challenge ahead for sales teams to get started is the quality of data that is collected, and its required to begin with dependable and reliable sales lead data, and follow different leads simultaneously.

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Maps help startups and their sales to focus locating prospects who are available at different places in a single source of truth, and reach more potential customers with ease of being hyper-local. The advantage that most other players don't get is being local while raking a challenge of competing with bigger giants. Field sales also need to focus on route optimization, and organize sales lead's efforts jointly. Each product is different, and so are clients, deals, and budgets. It's a business owner(s) wise choice to choose the best product in the market, or work towards a better choice outsourcing sales services and grow the startup profitably. Accumulate leads, Remain competitive. Decrease Overheads.

It's a special meaning for any sales managers and sales representatives as they use it daily, prepare a strategy that can help you to grab the market, focus where your potential market exists, and ensure that your business runs well.

Instant Lead Generation

Sales territory mapping incorporates access to public, crowd sourced data as well as the data supplied by company's CRM package. The biggest challenge with data-refining in sales is how to mix structured data with unstructed heaps, and if your sales platform could help you on this use-case, would you recommend us a client?

In sales, focusing on a bigger picture yields intensive individual results. Every lead is unique in their characteristics which means handling them differently from others aligns efforts of the entire sales workforce with their customer base. As sales teams grow and scale in size, they cater to a progressively larger leads base and territory governance and sales fleet management. Its definitely tempting to dive right into prospecting in sales, but strategizing enables sales teams to cover a wider range of markets spanning across industries, and geographical locales.

Territory Management is one such strategic planning tactic that is based on awareness that sales is interconnected and agents from different teams may need to share data in order to stick to the "bigger picture". Moreover when prospects are aligned as a consolidated data silo, you have lesser localized "islands" of sales data.

ABC’s of Territory Building

The basic building blocks for territory building are as follows: Territory Building can use one or more combinations of these building blocks to be assigned to sales personnel.

**Effective territory aligning: **Each salesperson must be responsible for a concentrated regional territory and in practice the territory distribution must be well balanced so that maximum area is covered with minimum effort. The alignment is such that every salesperson is not assigned to an unusually large territory with a heavy set of prospects and none is assigned a low populated territory. It pays to check the priority of leads within an assigned territory in order to check over-the-top prospecting efforts on low quality leads. Keep your sales workforce charged-up and motivated. The slightest slackness within your sales team can impact closure.

Build your organizations own sales model: Aligning your sales workforce with regional territories will help you develop a unique organizational structure for sales. This model can be used as future reference when restructuring your internal sales teams and assigning territories to the right sub-teams.

Make judicious use of your workforce: Your most efficient sales personnel are best suited for high priority leads which is why territory management helps you make wise decisions with respect to lead assignment using available resources reasonably.

Unleash the power of data sharing:Data sharing is a powerful asset to sales since your most skilled team is given the freedom to use the customer data available in a way that's advantageous to all parties involved. With shared data, communication and collaboration visibly improve leading tothe introduction of better sales strategies including up-selling and cross-selling.

Bring a keen sense of balance into disruptive sales when distribution of sales workforce and territories are equally balanced, there will eventually be an even distribution of sales coverage.

Grouping Customer Accounts: Territory Management starts with grouping customer accounts together so that they can be assigned and shared with ease. You can categorize and group customer accounts on-fly that can have a significant impact on results. Here are a few classifications of account grouping:

  • Unique Customer Accounts – High-ticket sales
  • Location markers. Ex. postal code.
  • Industry they belong to – Revenue expected or received.
  • ABC Classification – Associated local connects

Key benefits of Territory Management in Enterprise Sales

Sales Automation is crucial for Enterprise Sales. Territory Management is a big piece of this puzzle and every organization implementing it has been largely successful. Here are the key benefits of introducing territory management to any sales organisation:

**Enquiry Segregation **Enterprise sales enquiries are segregated between domestic and international sales teams within a workforce. This feature does away with a need for manual segregation since it is implemented on CRM and is automated. As such, resources can be judiciously utilised for managing enquiries rather than for finding and assigning enquiries that quite possibly arrive in few hundreds, or more in enterprises.

**Zone-based Hierarchy **When territory management is implemented and automated, a hierarchy will be set for enquiries received and enquiries are segregated based on respective zones. When a zone based internal structure is defined for enterprise sales teams, enquiries can be accommodated as per their hierarchy. Zone-based hierarchy involves setting a hierarchy for sales enquiries received for regions like Middle East, North America, Canada, and more.

**Hierarchy Tree **The hierarchy tree is a visual depiction of zone based-hierarchies for enterprise sales. Hierarchies are defined based on regions, countries, cities, etc.. using a hierarchy tree so that zonal inquiries are assigned and managed in a way that optimizes resource utilization and adheres to defined hierarchies.

Developing Hierarchy Tree – Setting up Parameters:

While developing your zonal hierarchy tree, as a decision maker the sales manager gets to choose a visual representation, one that works best with their organisation. Here are the parameters to be set up while building your hierarchy tree:

**Parent Territory **Parent Territories are larger areas encompassing children or sub-territories. Parent Territories can have one or more sub territories but only one parent unless they are a top-level territory.

**Child Territory **Child territories are sub territories and usually have one parent. Siblings are child territories that share the same parent.

**Territory-based Auto Assigning **Auto assigning in Territory Management is a concept which when implemented automatically reroutes sales inquiries by parsing the parameters derived from them. Territory-based auto assigning uses filters to look for relevant keywords in inquiries received. For instance, let’s say an lead sent a message as follows, "We are looking for ERP in India." With filters set up to look for geography-based keywords such as "India", this feature will auto assign this email inquiry to the sales person designated to manage inquiries for Asia-Pacific Japan.

**Territory-based Sales Funnel and Reporting **Perhaps the most powerful boon that territory management grants to enterprise sales and the most important feature yet is zone-wise sales funnel and reporting. With separate sales funnels for each territory, there is a clearer and more concentrated vision of leads and their journey for each zone. Zone-wise reporting generates sales reports for every territory that a sales force deals with, contributing to resource optimization and productivity boost.

**Round-robin Assignment **Round robin is a lead assignment strategy that prevents missed lead enquiries due to the unavailability of sales personnel. Call/email enquiry routing is done in a cyclical fashion to reduce TAT (Turn-Around Time).

In conclusion

Territory Management is a valuable process in inside-sales which improves insight bringing about a transformation in operations. By leveraging customer data and market trends, a territory management software does territory planning for your team, bringing about a balance within inside sales. If you liked this post, kindly do subscribe! If you have any other questions about closing a sale, or sales related generic questions, feel free to write back to us.

Good luck selling!