Sales Territory Mapping: The Ultimate Guide for 2021

Sales territory mapping plays a crucial role in optimizing sales processes and improving sales rep efficiency for many organizations and businesses.

By creating ‘territories’, you can better leverage resources and sales processes within a set field you create from derived data and an understanding of your market.

Territories give sales leaders the opportunity to continually monitor and enhance performance within each territory ultimately allowing them to optimize sales.

Mapping out sales territories is an intricate process that has to be done right, but as long as you use the right tools and understand the best territory management practices, utilizing sales territory mapping will supercharge your sales processes and results.

What Is Sales Territory Mapping?

Sales territory mapping is the process of ‘mapping’ out defined territories for your reps to manage.

Think of it like formulating a plan of attack for your reps.

In this plan of attack, you are considering demographics, targets, potential consumers etc. to specify the right reps to specific territories based on their strengths and weaknesses.

By taking the time to map out the data you will learn to collect later on in this article, you can carefully allocate prospects to the rep or reps that have the right skills to convert them into sales.

Benefits of Using Sales Territory Mapping

Before you begin to dive into sales territory mapping, let’s talk about the number of benefits you will reap:

Measure performance - Working within territories makes it easier to measure how your reps are performing and how they’re matching up with the prospects in their territory. It also helps you ensure that reps are not overlapping each other’s sales, and makes it easier to analyze overall performances.

Data-driven insights - The better quality data provided to a sales leader, the better insights they can gain into how well their sales reps and processes are working. By assigning datasets to each territory, sales leaders can continually make improvements and optimize performance.

Reduce costs - Defining territories and assigning reps to those territories makes it easy to organize your sales team and optimize how they’re spending their time. This reduces costs on travel, spending time on the wrong prospects, etc.

Good for morale - When morale is high, reps perform better. By assigning a defined territory, reps know exactly what they’re working with, and adjustments can be made if they feel overwhelmed or overworked for any reason.

Creating a Sales Territory Map for Your Business

Let’s break down some of the best practices needed to create the ultimate sales territory map for your business. The following 7 steps will provide you the confidence to implement a sales territory map in no time.

1. Inspect and evaluate your business’s goals and resources

Before beginning it’s important to take a step back and assess the view, or more clearly, an overview of your company’s landscape. Some critical items to deliberate are as follows:

• Deciding how you’re going to create territories - Territories aren’t always geographical, you can create territories around market potential, industry, account type, products, etc.
• Deciding how you’re going to assign reps - Assigning the right rep is just as important as creating the right territory. You need to be aware of a rep’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they align with the customers in a territory.
• Defining what your goals are - Setting goals and targets is sales 101, but territories gives you an opportunity to go a level deeper. You can set goals around increasing revenue within a territory, selling a certain number of products, reducing sales cycle times, and so on.
• Understanding how you’re going to measure success - You’ll only know how successful your territories are by collecting and analyzing the data. This is made possible by using sales tracking software like SetSail. SetSail collects data points around the metrics that are important to you, and uses AI and machine learning to show you how your reps are performing and uncovers insights that will help you make better decisions.

2. Create your customer personas

An effective sales technique to segment an audience is to create customer personas. This is something you can do specific to a territory, or you can utilize this data to help your reps better understand their customers.

Customer personas are also known as buyer personas and are semi-fictional archetypes that summarize the characteristics, needs, and behaviors of an audience type or consumer.

By grouping customers by persona, you’re able to assign a rep that has the skills and experience to best serve those customers.

SetSail separates itself from other tools by collecting more data points around customer behaviors than any other software, helping you build incredibly detailed and accurate customer personas.

This data empowers your reps with the knowledge they need from the moment they make contact with a customer. Helping them to build stronger customer relationships and better enabling them to sell more.

3. Understand Your Reps’ Strengths and Weaknesses

Sales reps will be the first to say that no two reps’ strengths and weaknesses are the same. It’s being able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an individual rep and leverage those within a territory that has a huge impact on success.

This is something that can only be achieved - at least down to a micro level - by using intelligent sales software.

By capturing every aspect of a rep’s performance, SetSail helps you pinpoint exactly what a rep’s strengths and weaknesses are based on their actual behaviors and results.

This enables you to identify weaknesses, and provide coaching to help reps improve in those areas. As well identifying strengths, and finding a way to leverage those strengths to help reps sell more.

4. Generate a SWOT analysis

A superhero disguised as an acronym. SWOT ( Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis helps you clearly depict your business assets and vulnerabilities, which are vital to understand when creating a sales territory map.

You want to understand your strengths to be able to capitalize on them while respecting your weaknesses to prevent them from sinking you. Answering these simple questions can provide you with solid knowledge of your business’s standing:

• What strengths will you utilize?
• What weaknesses do you need to be aware of?
• Where are the opportunities in your marketplace?
• What tactics need to be developed to avoid potential threats?

Source: corporatefinanceinstitute.com

5. Define your territories

This is where the information and data you have gathered in the steps above all melts together and you create a similar analysis as the SWOT analysis. It is also the most important step in optimizing your territories for the best results.

When creating territories it’s important to keep in mind the following:

• Assessing internally generated data
• Understand what you already know about your customers and prospects

• Gain geospatial data
• The location of your customers and prospects, alongwith geographical data that can assist in design and implementation in different territories

• Understand industry boundaries
• Know your market and use differences to divide your territories

• Collaborate with reps already in the field
• Talk to those already specializing in specific markets

6. Assign reps to territories

Some ideas to consider when assigning reps to territories:

• How well do you know if your reps can manage the number of customers in their territory?
• Do you have a robust sales enablement plan in place to ensure your reps have everything they need?
• Have you set KPIs that will enable you to measure performance?
• Analyze a sales reps tenure, career path and skills and set them up for success

7. Motivate your reps and monitor performance

Assigning reps to territories that play into their strengths sets the stage for them to excel and sell more.

However, reps need to be motivated to perform at their best, hit their quotas, continually improve - and to exceed what they thought was possible.

Motivating reps in ways that are going to be effective presents some difficult challenges. No two reps are the same, and everyone responds differently to different motivational techniques.

But Setsail has made it easy, we’ve built one of the most comprehensive sales leaderboards of any sales software. Reps can see exactly how they’re progressing towards their sales targets in real-time, and how they stack up against other sales team members.

You can set monetary rewards that are automatically unlocked when reps achieve their quotas, and we’ve also made it possible for reps to communicate with one another.

This creates a form of gamification, which is known to help motivate reps, encourages collaboration, and creates a more fun and productive winning culture.

With the large amount of sales data SetSail collects, there’s almost no limit in terms of the metrics you can monitor to measure performance.

Additional Aspects to Consider...

Use The Right Territory Mapping Tools

Using the right territory mapping tools is essential. Data is everything in sales, and not just any data but quality, reliable data.

This is where SetSail comes in.

SetSail collects more data points than any other sales software solution and is the first Signal-Based Selling software to use a combination of AI and behavioral science.

This means you’re getting powerful insights from a wide range of data that has been collected, cleansed and enriched from a specific territory.

You have complete control over what data you collect and how you use it. You can set your own KPIs and territory goals, take a deep dive into individual rep behaviors, and much more.

Take Into Account Your Existing Customers

Your existing customers are incredibly valuable to your business. Both because they are already paying customers, and because they are a source of data to help you optimize how you’re going to map your territories.

When planning new sales territories, you have to take into account your existing customers. It’s a good idea to start with a visual map and by marking all of your existing customers out.

See if you can start building territories around your current customers. Whether that’s going to be geographical, based on what they bought, or something else.

How Will You Measure Performance?

Using an intelligent sales territory mapping software like SetSail is the only way to accurately measure performance - and more importantly, continually optimize performance by territory.

The reason why you map out territories is to make better use of your resources and better monitor how your reps are selling within their territory.

When monitored correctly, this drives powerful insights into how a rep is performing and will uncover behaviors and actions that can often make an immediate impact.

How you choose to measure performance will vary based on the metrics that are important to you.

The best way to do this is to set some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that allow you to measure performance before and after you make changes to your sales process.

SetSail enables you to set KPIs around any customer behaviors, metrics, or values that help you evaluate how successful or productive your reps are.

The software then collects, cleanses and enriches data on those KPIs and enables you to keep an eye on performance in real-time, and see the impact of any changes you make.

Conclusion

Sales territory mapping has come a long way in recent years. This sales technique has evolved from being based purely on location, to using tools to identify territories based on a range of factors and assigning the right reps based on their strengths.

When mapped out right, sales territory mapping is one of the most effective sales techniques for accelerating continually optimizing revenue.

Use the right tool when creating your sales territory map and let SetSail make it easy.

SetSail is the first Signal-Based Selling sales management software to use a combination of AI and behavioral science to help businesses turn their sales data into better sales behaviors.

This intelligent software uses a data-driven approach to build custom end-to-end solutions that make a real difference to how sales teams perform.

SetSail is relied on by huge global brands like HubSpot, Cisco, and Dropbox. It’s a true end-to-end solution to help you gain insights into how your sales team is performing and ways you can improve productivity and performance. Tour the product →

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