Best Practices for Territory Management

Salesforce is a powerful platform that can help your business grow and succeed. But as your sales organization expands, managing sales coverage and rules of engagement can get messy, quickly.

If your sales organization is experiencing lack of visibility, inefficient resource allocation, collaboration difficulties, poor customer experience, or difficulty scaling, it’s time to add more structure to your sales team’s process. 

That’s where Salesforce Territory Management comes in.

As your RevOps team starts their journey into Salesforce Territory Management, we’re providing insights and strategies to help you reap its many benefits. We’ll be examining how admins can step in to properly implement this valuable tool, as well as explore which common pain points it resolves. 

What is Territory Management and What Are it’s Benefits?

Territory Management is a feature within Salesforce that enables you to structure, organize, and optimize sales efforts by dividing and assigning accounts and opportunities to sales teams or representatives based on specific criteria, such as geographical region, industry, customer size, or product line.

The primary goal of Salesforce Territory Management is to make sure the right sales resources are allocated to the right customers. This results in improved sales coverage, better customer engagement, and ultimately, increased revenue. 

Let’s dive into the specific advantages of this feature can have for your org: 

1. Resource allocation 

Territory management allows your teams to allocate resources and optimize budget more effectively by assigning sales reps to specific geographic regions, industries, or customer segments. This ensures that each territory gets the right attention and resources, resulting in better coverage,customer engagement and a better ROI for the business.

2. Sales efficiency 

By dividing sales regions and customer segments into well-defined territories, your sales reps can focus their efforts on a more manageable number of accounts. This increases efficiency and allows reps to build deeper relationships with your customers, leading to higher close rates and revenue growth. This also allows the business to align specialized reps or top performers to the corresponding territory that will drive the greatest success.

3. Performance measurement

RevOps teams can track and analyze the performance of each territory, allowing you to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach can lead to more informed decision-making and better resource allocation.

4. Accountability and motivation

Clear territory assignments create a sense of ownership and responsibility among your sales reps, motivating them to achieve their targets and contribute to overall revenue growth.

5. Collaboration 

Well-defined territories can facilitate better collaboration between your marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Each team can understand their role and responsibilities within a specific territory, leading to improved communication, teamwork and overall results.

6. Scalability 

As your business grows, having a territory management system in place makes it easier to expand your sales operations and onboard new sales reps. This ensures that your Salesforce org is well-organized and ready to scale with the company’s growth.

7. Customer satisfaction

Understanding customer interactions and striving for satisfaction is key to successful sales territories. By minimizing travel costs and time, reps can redirect focus to driving a more efficient experience with customers, ultimately boosting your company’s reputation through improved engagement. 

Things to Consider When Implementing Territory Management

Sales managers have to walk a fine line between balance and efficiency. Establishing territories can help maximize productivity among sales reps, but only if those territories are well constructed. In order to achieve a successful outcome, here are the main factors to consider when implementing Territory Management: 

1. Coverage 

Consider the size, structure and working hours of the team needed to meet service requirements. If this balance is off, it can lead to several problems. Some of these include:

• Distorted compensation among sales reps
• Unfair distributions of sales potential
• High rep turnover

If your reps are quitting to find more reasonable workload and better compensation elsewhere, your territory management may need to be restructured to allow some more flexibility and balance for your reps. 

2. Capacity

What is the workload of teams compared to the demand of sales territories? Get the big picture by considering:

• What’s the total addressable market for your territory?
• What is current market penetration? 
• Are some accounts being neglected? 
• Why are some being pursued over others?

It’s important to take into account the nature of the assignment and workload of the sales team. 

3. Competition

Dive into your competitive landscape and evaluate what it looks like based on your sales territory assignments. A few things to consider:

• Are there geographic or product-line specific competitors that require specialized expertise?
• Is there a certain territory where you may need additional sales coverage against a primary competitor?
• Do certain territories require an enterprise sales experience to be competitive?

10 Territory Management Best Practices

What are best practices for planning and managing territory management tasks? We’ve compiled 4 best practices for working on implementations with complex management requirements and large-scale sales realignments. 

1. Define clear objectives

Establish specific goals and objectives for your territory management strategy. These may include increasing market penetration, improving customer engagement, or optimizing resource allocation. Clearly defined objectives will guide your territory management design and execution.

2. Have an intimate understanding of your TAM

Understanding your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and ideal customer profile will tell you exactly who you need to target and why by providing a full picture of the market and helping you identify where you have the best opportunity to win. Analyze your customer base and divide it into segments based on factors such as geography, industry, company size, or customer behavior. This segmentation will help you identify the right criteria for creating territories and allocating resources.

3. Balance territories 

Strive for balanced territories in terms of revenue potential, workload, and sales rep skills. This ensures that your sales reps have a fair and manageable workload, and can focus on building strong customer relationships that contribute to revenue growth.

4. Create assignment rules so accounts and leads are assigned to the appropriate territory 

Create and execute specific rules to ensure that new or updated accounts are automatically assigned to the appropriate territory. Organize your sales team structure to support these defined territories. This process may involve creating specialized roles to ensure that each territory has the necessary resources and expertise.

5. Decide the level of visibility you want to provide team members in and across territories 

Ensure that the right users can view and modify the territory model elements, records, and record elements in Enterprise Territory Management. This reduces the “noise” which can improve sales productivity and ensure territory team’s aren’t inadvertently working the same accounts.

6. Create territory specific reports to monitor and manage territory performance and demand 

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure the success of your territory management efforts. Common KPIs include revenue growth, market penetration, and customer satisfaction. Regularly analyze and evaluate these metrics by developing specific reports that measure all variables including territory assignments, accounts, opportunities, leads, and users.

7. Review and adjust regularly

If you set your territories up right, you should start to see early wins in market share penetration. This could mean that you need to re-align your territories to support new customers and re-allocate sales resources to support new markets.

8. Invest in training and support

Provide your sales reps with the necessary training and support to effectively navigate and manage their territories. This may include training on Salesforce tools, territory management techniques, and customer engagement strategies.

9. Leverage Salesforce automation

Utilize Salesforce’s automation features, such as Flow to streamline territory management tasks and ensure that your sales reps are focusing on high-impact activities. Keep in mind that if you’re still working in workflows and process builders, these tools need to be migrated to Flow by the end of 2023.

10. Monitor and maintain data quality

Ensure that your Salesforce data is accurate, up-to-date, and complete. This is crucial for effective territory management, as it enables better decision-making and resource allocation based on reliable data.

Conclusion: Simplify Salesforce Territory Management

With Salesforce’s Territory Management tool, your RevOps teams can unlock tremendous potential from your sales territories. The ability to define separate divisions, assign ownerships accordingly and monitor performance provides a clear path for improvement – allowing your teams to improve customer experience while optimizing resource allocations that lead to better-performing results along the way. 

With Sonar, Ops leaders can ensure changes to territory management programs never unintentionally disrupt the flow of GTM productivity or lead distribution. Before implementing any change, know exactly what effects it will have on profiles and assignment rules across your organization with this powerful tool! Try Sonar free today.

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