Segment Your Customers:

Not all accounts are of the same value to your company. And not all prospects are going to require the same quantity of time and effort from their sales rep. So ideally you need to segment your customers (and possible clients) before you embark on a territory design exercise. If you’re thinking of re-segmenting your customers in the future, you need to consider doing it before creating new territories.

The reason for this is easy. High potential prospects should receive more attention than lower potential accounts. If there’s a re-segmentation of the customers, the amount of high, medium and low potential customers in each territory will change. So the workload of each territory will also change. Since the workload is a critical alignment factors, the whole alignment will be most probably be misaligned.

Outline The Territory Design Criteria:

You really need to sit down before a sales territory design exercise and decide what criteria you are going to use to redesign the territories. Put simply, what makes a good sales territory and what policies are you going to established to control the change. If you leave these talks and decisions until later in the design exercise, you might find yourself in a awkward political mess.

The sorts of factors and policies you want to outline are:

• What quantitative factors should be balanced (e.g. Sales potential and workload)
• The weight given to each element
• Human resource policies such as:
• Availability of relocations
• If a rep must live in their territory (and any reasons for exceptions)

After you’ve created your sales territory design criteria you need to make the alignment index (this is a topic for another article). The index will then be used to audit your present alignment – once again, a topic for another article

Steve Maughan is President of Cozmix Inc. Which specializes in Sales Force Mapping. For full information visit the website and join up to our free sales territory mapping resources

Two Ways to Quickly Improve Your Sales Force Territory Alignment is a post from: WiredWriter