Steps to Sales Territory Planning

An old saying states that if you Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail.  Quite apt!

1.    Segment you customers

Take a good look at your existing clients, prospects, and leads. Start by dividing your customers based on location, vertical, purchase history, or another relevant characteristic. Traditionally, a sales territory refers to a geographical area assigned to an individual salesperson or team. However, a more modern definition encompasses sales territories created around certain types of customer and audience segments. It can make more sense depending on your structure to divvy up customers by industry, referral source, product, or account size.

2.    Conduct a SWOT analysis of your sales team.

Analise their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. What are each of them good at, where do they excel?  Is there a particular stage of the sales process where leads tend to lose interest? Are there any bottlenecks or leaks in your pipeline that need addressing?  Is there an untapped market or under serviced geographical area?  Are there particular threats to specific segments that you have identified that could be best handled by specific team members?  Once the evaluation has been completed, act on the information!

3.    Assign staff members to each segment you identified.

Based on your analysis, identify the segments that would most suit your team members

4.    Create a contact schedule so you can keep in touch with all your accounts.

Determine how much contact each account requires to determine how often your reps should reach out. Consider whether the customer requires a physical meeting to renew their contract or can be managed over the phone.  An easy way to decide on call frequency is to rate your customers as either A, B, C or D (based on Revenue or Gross Profit) and then assign a call frequency to that letter.  There will be a few who sit outside of this framework but it should work for at least 80%
This is quite basic stuff, yet we often forget the basics!