Sales Territory Design

Do you have a mix of good reps and poor reps? Or do you really just have a mix of good territories and bad territories? If you aren’t sure, then territory design is likely an issue.

Sales reps deemed comparable in skill set and salary opportunity should succeed or fail based on the quality of their sales skills and efforts, not on the quality of accounts in their territory.

Any sales territory design necessarily balances three things–whether you’re designing this balance deliberately or inadvertently:

Geography Are your reps driving past each other all day long, or do they have clean territory lines? Do you have a center city rep with a tiny, nearly walkable territory and a suburban rep who spends half her time traveling between clients?
Balance & Equitability Do you have a lot of markets with a star rep and one or more positions that regularly underperform and/or churn? Is this because you have a star player and a weak rep, or because you have all the potential locked up in one sales territory?
Stability & Non-Disruption Changing accounts between reps is risky–do it without the proper preparation, too often or without good cause, and you can drive good reps out the door and drive away great customers. Don’t do it at all and you can struggle to grow, or even stagnate.

We can help you understand how your managers (past and present) been weighing these factors, think about how you want to balance these factors (and what the implications of that might be) and implement changes that measure all three factors.