As a sales manager or business owner you will know how important it is to ensure your sales team has the best chance of maximising their sales potential.
But how can a sales territory map play a vital role in helping your teams achieve success?
A crucial decision made easier
Choosing the right sales territories is crucial as the areas sales staff have to cover can have a huge impact – either negative or positive – on their way of working and their results. But it is not just a case of choosing a sales area that conforms to geographical boundaries or traditional county/state lines, which are often unwieldy or are in conflict with business aspirations.
These days, technology combined with greater access to a wide range of intelligence and hard data has made it easier to choose the right locations for sales teams, based on the factors that really matter to your business.
Sales Territory Design uses this potent combination and is being increasingly recognised as the way to strategically plan sales areas, rather than going with tradition or gut instinct. At its core, it is the use of a Location Intelligence System – like Tech4T’s Territory Runner System – to design sales territory maps that offer the same opportunities to all of a company’s sales staff and are created to minimise travelling time and costs.
Understanding your customers and sales potential
Expert location intelligence specialists that provide the more advanced Location Intelligence Systems can work with sales managers to fully examine the sales potential in any given area – or across the country or the world – and help them design their sales territory boundaries as well as the size of their remote sales force.
This can involve a deep data analysis of customer profiles and the characteristics of their prospects, whether they are consumers or businesses, and segmentation of their target audiences by factors such as values, interests and more.
And the best systems and experts can even help you make decisions not only on current sales areas, but also, as more information comes in, on future sales territories.
Getting to grips with logistics
Understanding what is logistically possible is also important to anyone planning or overseeing a successful sales territory, and is made far easier by a sales territory map. Workload calculations can be factored in for each segment and location, taking into account elements such as the channels that will be used to contact customers and prospects, and even the frequency and duration of visits.
And the travel preferences and personal circumstances of sales staff can also be included, ensuring that the areas being covered are practical for them. After all, no salesperson wants a sales territory that is impossible for them to properly service or doesn’t fit in with their family and personal commitments.
Internal data
As well as factoring in logistical factors and including the most robust and up to date external data available – covering everything from transport information to the location of competitors and prospects – the best data analysis and mapping specialists can also ensure the Location Intelligence System you use includes data from your own company, from sales reports to Excel spreadsheets.
This means sales managers can access all the information related to the optimisation of their sales team and their sales territories in one secure system.
Conclusion
So if you’re a business owner or sales manager, think carefully about how your sales territories are organised and whether your sales team is really optimised to achieve the best results. A sales territory map can help you maximise opportunities and give them the very best chance of success.
