How to Optimize Your Sales Territories for Maximum Coverage and Efficiency

A significant aspect of building a strong sales strategy is creating optimized sales territories. Selling becomes hard when multiple stakeholders are scattered across the nation or globe with different time zones. Besides, there is also the longer and non-linear sales cycle consideration, which affects the results. 

Nonetheless, the process becomes easier when we divide the entire target region into subregions and assign it to a particular sales rep or sales manager. This is called building up sales territories. It ensures that most of the target region is covered and no area is left from where opportunities can be missed. 

The entire thing might sound easy, but it is not. Besides, you cannot progress to set quotes if you haven’t set your boundaries. It is impossible to determine the salesperson’s total cash compensation if you don’t have insights about workload, opportunity, and capacity. Territory planning is fundamental to any business’ revenue operation strategy, and if you are wondering how to optimize it, you are at the right place. 

What Happens If You Don’t Optimize Your Sales Territories?

Successful outcomes of everything depend upon the implementation of a well-planned strategy, and the same is the case with sales. If you have designed sales territories and assigned them to the right sales manager, you can expect better outcomes. However, if sales territories are planned in haste, let’s look at potential outcomes: 

• Drop in revenue earnings 
• Underachievement of quota 
• Decreased motivation and lower sales rep morale
• Sales burnout 
• Unsatisfied prospects or customers 

All of these can significantly affect your business operations, revenue, and reputation in the market. Besides, the perception of favouritism and seniority while territory designing can damage the company unfathomably. 

Three Aspects of Modernizing Sales Territory Planning 

Sales territory planning was a tedious task when the technology hadn’t evolved, and sales managers had to use pens, papers, and a map to set territories and align sales reps accordingly. However, the times have changed, and now there are three major aspects to consider to modernize your sales territory planning: 

1. Data-driven insights: Data is a powerful tool that can reveal insights or trends that one would not normally consider. With data analytics, businesses can uncover areas that need improvement. It helps refine the strategy and build an efficient sales territory so that every area generates higher prospects and profits. 
2. Automated processes: Automating the sales territory planning can help businesses design cost-efficient territories. It is because the automation model can quickly distribute potential sales opportunities and workloads without any bias. 
3. Increased collaboration: The territory planning tools allow sales managers to collaborate in the process and refine the strategy. This leads to the creation of well-defined territories as per sales rep potential and capabilities.   

Optimize Your Sales Territories with Technology

The world offers benefits for those who utilize technology to optimize their operations. It might be a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is advanced softwares, like sales territory management or route optimization, is designed to maximize the potential of your operations and resources. 

This is also proven. Businesses that introduced territory management software in their sales operations have witnessed a 7% yearly increase in sales through territory redesign. Also, the businesses have noticed a 14% increase in sales objective achievement compared to other companies. 

When businesses use manual tools, like spreadsheets and maps, to design territories, the sales managers cannot effectively tap into sales data and build lucrative sales territories. Besides, it is impossible to consider every aspect while designing territories. 

However, the situation changes when you have the assistance of software. The software is designed to consider all the aspects and then find a perfect solution. It utilizes historical and financial data to recognize a trend and provide suggestions to optimize the territory design. 

How can Software Optimize Sales Territories for Maximum Coverage and Efficiency?

With the help of sales territory optimization software, businesses can design territories based on different parameters, like workload, sales potential, geographic constraints, travel time, and more. Besides, these software support advanced features, like analytics, data visualization, and mapping technologies, which help businesses to optimize their resources upto full extent and maximize sales performance. 

Let’s look at some of the common features of sales territory management software which help businesses maximize coverage and ensure efficiency: 

• Map-based Visualization 

Visualization helps in the creation of better strategies. With a map-based visualization feature, the sales manager can visualize critical data, like customers, sales reps, leads, sale coverage, lead density, and more on a map. It can help to draw helpful insights about the territory’s performance, and it will help the sales manager to make well-informed decisions. 

• Territory Alignment 

The software is designed to align the territories into relevant clusters based on different data points, such as customers, point of interest (POI) customers, competition, and more. It can allocate resources, balance territories, and ensure equal coverage. With customer segmentation and data-driven insights, managers can identify high-potential areas and assign them to the right sales rep. 

• Area Segmentation 

The software divides and categorizes the area by different criteria, like demographics, market trends, and customer presence. It avoids territory overlapping and coverage gaps. It ensures that the right sales rep covers every area, and the sales rep can implement tailored strategies within their territory to convert customers. 

• Predictive Analysis 

The sales territory management software utilizes ML-based models that analyze historical data and customer behaviour patterns to predict future trends. With future trends in hand, sales managers can refine the strategy and implement steps to improve conversion rates accordingly. 

• Territory Performance Management 

All the software offers insights and data about key metrics to measure territory performance. It enables sales managers to monitor and track sales team performance in a particular territory and identify gaps for improvement.  

Benefits of Investing in Sales Territory Management Software 

Let’s understand how your sales team performance will benefit from sales territory management software: 

1. Some software offer dynamic route planning, reducing your sales team’s travelling time and enhancing efficiency.
2. Sales managers can design sales territory strategically, assign reps as per area definition to the right size teams, and boost sales coverage. 
3. Sales reps remain focused and aligned to their goals. 
4. Software maps the sales rep to the territories in context with territory potential, lead density, and customer and competition presence, improving sales engagement. 
5. The software designs the territories such that all the sales reps and managers get equal areas and the entire area is covered. 

Wrapping up, 

There are many strategies for building and designing territories. However, sales territory software can maximize the potential of your efforts. Investing in the right software is the key, and if businesses are looking for one such strategic software, then your search ends here. 

Nomadia’s Territory Manager is reliable software that increases your sales team’s efficiency. The software can help you identify all the imbalances and dysfunctions in your strategies that stand in the way of achieving your objectives. Schedule a demo today!