Sales territory plays a crucial role in strengthening the sales of any company. It’s an important pillar in the sales strategy. It has numerous benefits that include encouraging sales team morale, improving chances of achieving sales targets, imparting the wide range of customer base.

Territory planning should be wisely and attentively made because a small wrong step can block the progress of the company. Territory planning should always be balanced and constant. Wrong planning can break the relationship with the customer and can also demoralize the salesperson.

What do you understand by Sales Territory?

Sales territory is the distribution of geographical area or customer group to the sales unit. A company allocates the market on the basis of area or customer category to different sales team. And every sales team is responsible for its zone and its targets.

Sales Territory Planning

Sales Territory Planning is a very crucial as all sales aspects depend on it.  And to plan the sales territory following steps should be taken:

Assess Your Market

The first step of planning is to understand the environment of the business in which it grows. Sales leaders are required to analyze the market area in which business will grow and accordingly divide the sales territories. Territories can be divided on the basis of geography, size, customer demographics, etc.

Evaluate your market demands and its climate and recognize the factors which make you distinct from others. All these factors help to set up compelling sales territories and drive to reduce the cost and increase sales.

Judge Account Quality

When you decide upon target market, sales leaders have to calculate the value of each account. The valuation of accounts can be qualitative or quantitative according to the product or services offered by the business. For instance, a liquor company valued their accounts on the basis of net profits whereas business that depends upon customer proposal is based on the referrals.

Every account has its own importance; you can segregate the sales territory according to it.

Judge Territory Quality

Let’s move to the next step – valuation of territory quality which depends upon the quality of account. This is not only based on the value of accounts but it also considered the different requirements and preferences of the business. Suppose your business sells its product to the different industries; the territory can be divided on the basis of the industry that purchases the goods. Further, you can rank the territories as high, medium and low according to the business you earned.

Involve your sales team to get better results as they know better scenario than you. They give better knowledge and facts about the territory as they spend a whole day working on it. In this way, you can assign the task to boost the probable margins of the sales representatives.

Appraise the strength of representative

Till now you assess your accounts and territories effectively and now it’s time to assign a representative who has the desired ability and skills to improve and expand each group of the accounts. The representative has the ability to assess the nature of every deal and take the necessary steps accordingly.

Learn how to Convince your Prospects

This stage is the most viable because without representative all the planning will be insignificant. For e.g. a sales representative is a person who can handle all the deals in an effective manner. Also he could negotiate and encounter settle enormous negotiations. This helps in making a good rapport with your customers. Representative can take all necessary steps to assure customers about good negotiations and administration.

Observe and Integrate

Sales leaders scrutinize the cost metrics, which enable to focus the inefficient aspects in planning. By comparing the targets with the actual counts, you can determine the feasibility of each representative of different territories.

Now, it has become necessary to integrate the plan after observing it. Sales territory planning is important to improve your work performance, arise work satisfaction among Sales team and develop brand reputation with your customers. Overall, it helps the organization in improving and earn high value and revenue, both.

Thus, a well-versed sales territory planning helps to compete in the market in the best way. If the targets are specified clearly and sales team knows their responsibilities in advance to achieve his targets. It assists to control the costs and expenses and inspire the morale of the sales team.

All the sales related strategies can only be implemented well if you have a proficient Sales team. But if you don’t have a sound Sales team, no strategy can work. No matter how hard you’ll work. In that case hiring an expert and experienced marketing agency is always recommended. Here’re a few tips for choosing the perfect branding agency.  Hopefully we have covered all the points in the blog post. Would love to know your views in the comment section.