Sean Huckstep Success begins with visualization. Territory management is a big part of successfully operating a sales team, and doing it wrong wastes time and loses deals. If you worry that you’re not making the most of your territories, there are simple fixes to optimize your current strategy and plan better in the future.
What is Sales Territory Mapping?
Sales territory mapping is the process of defining and creating the areas, sales, and revenue that your reps are responsible for targeting. If done correctly, it can help reps reach the most qualified customers, hit revenue goals, and promote company growth.
3 Methods to Territory Mapping
#1 Clover Leafing
When you’re clover leafing, you’re focused on high value engagements with current customers, appointments, or hot leads. Since you know where all these people live, use that information to plan out your day. Build a route out of each primary destination for the day, and use it to plan out your movements. For example, say you have just finished a follow up with a customer at 10:00 AM, but your next appointment isn’t until 12:30. You can see on the Routing screen that it will take 15 minutes to get to your appointment from where you are. Now you know that you can spend the next two hours canvassing the area around that customer, being sure to use their name to build rapport.
#2 Referral Work
When you collect a series of referrals from a customer or prospect, you can quickly plug them all into a route and efficiently visit all of them. This is especially useful when you have several referrals from several different sources. If you just visited all the referrals you got from Mrs. Smith and then all the referrals you got from Mr. Williams and then all the referrals you got from Ms. Hilton, you’re going to be running ragged all over the area. Just plug them all in, create a route, and visit them all quickly. Be sure to include in your lead notes who referred them, so that you can have a strong sales pitch with instant credibility.
#3 Setter/Closer Model
If you’re operating with setters and closers, routing is a great way to get the most out of your closers, who are usually your most talented salespeople. Closers usually travel the most of anyone on your team, so make sure they use routing to hit their destinations as fast and efficiently as possible. This will maximize the amount of time they spend in conversation with prospects and also bring down their lofty transportation costs.
How to Create a Sales Territory Map Strategy
If you don’t currently have a sales territory strategy, here are some simple first steps to follow before getting caught in the weeds:
- Define the parameters of your areas
- List your reps
- Identify and assign areas based on experience & skills
Optimize your Sales Territories
The key to optimizing your sales territories is having the right tools and technology. Not to toot our own horn, but our sales territory mapping software is among the best and it’s available in the paid and free versions of our app. Beyond the traditional software to track your sales areas, there are also tools like leaderboards that display necessary stats for each rep ranking them among the team.
Need Help Setting Up Routes?
If you need more help setting up routes, check out this quick tutorial.
Start Tracking For Free
SalesRabbit Lite includes a free route planner that will help your teams plan their day, get to more appointments, and lower their travel costs.
When used in sync with our Lead Tracking tools, the Routing feature is a powerful tool and can supplement strategic canvassing approaches. Our territory mapping software makes it easy to draw out areas, assign them to reps, and visually track their progress through those areas. You’ll be working areas intelligently, efficiently, and quickly.
