Sales territory mapping software promotes efficient collaboration between sales managers and their team. Discover the additional benefits automation provides.
To be frank–if you're not using data to drive your sales territory mapping, your territories might be hurting your sales performance more than they are helping it. Sales territory mapping software offers more benefits than sales managers and operations experts may realize. It promotes efficient collaboration between sales leadership and sales operations teams for more effective planning. It also creates optimized sales territories, increases quota attainment, and helps to improve overall sales performance.
The perspective you get from territory mapping software gives way to previously unseen patterns and insights that just don't populate through spreadsheets alone. As a result, organizations can design balanced, fair territories that maximize sales coverage and prioritize top prospects and existing customers.
What is the Latest Impact on Territory Mapping?
As organizations become more analytical and data-driven, there has been an increased demand for territory mapping software to help address more complicated needs. The solution? Intelligent informed planning that uses sales performance data as an asset. Unfortunately, many companies are designing sales territories manually using spreadsheets, which is time-consuming and fails to utilize data strategically.
Territories can be defined in many ways, including SMB vs. Enterprise, by purchase history, by the number of potential clients, by industry, or by a combination of multiple factors. Without data-driven territory mapping software, it's hard to ensure that your territories are fair and balanced, and it's important to keep territories balanced in order to boost sales and to save on overall costs.
In fact, a recent survey with the Sales Management Association found that companies using technology to aid their territory mapping saw up to 30 percent higher sales objective attainment than average.
If a territory is unbalanced, it can lead to a major headache for sales teams. For instance, a sales rep with a small territory might not have enough opportunity to work. On the other hand, a sales rep with a massive territory may not have the ability to effectively serve every customer and prospect. Territories should always be balanced in order to get the most out of every sales team's potential.
Optimized territories provide the ample foresight needed for business growth. When territories are poorly aligned, they lead to underserved prospects and customers, low employee morale, and misused sales resources. With this in mind, sales mapping software becomes critical to the success of every territory. You can use sales mapping software to divide territories by industry, spend, and more.
Helpful and intuitive automated territory design is driven by intelligent data. Not using that data efficiently is simply leaving money on the table. What's more, you need to be careful to use the right data to make the right decision about territories.
Does Your Company Need Territory Mapping Software?
Automated territory mapping software gives sales leaders and ops experts a visual representation of territories. Using data as the driver behind territory mapping provides confidence that each territory has the right amount of sales coverage, that top prospects and customers are prioritized, and that sales reps have equal opportunity to achieve quota.
Long gone are the days of mapping territories by hand. It's just not effective, and because your territories might not be balanced or fair, you run the risk of inducing a high rate of employee attrition. Instead, territory mapping software can help you create perfectly balanced territories that will prevent territory wars among sales reps—and are intricately optimized ro increase profits.
Having a balanced territory will ensure your team can make the best connections with every potential customer in a specific area without missing a beat. Territory mapping software intuitively places everything right in front of you in a concise and clear manner—from demographics to population density to purchase history competition to industry-related information and more.
In fact, research has found there is a 20% higher level of sales achievement achieved with the use of territory mapping software.
Plan for the Future Using Existing Territories with Analytics
With territory mapping software, you can maintain ideal-sized territories for the future. Meaning, if you have already invested the time and effort into correctly mapping your territories in the past, you don't have to clear the decks and start from scratch. Instead, you can import existing territories right into your territory mapping software. This process couldn't be more straightforward and convenient.
There are many analytical tools you can take advantage of with territory mapping software. In fact, you have multiple performance reporting choices. You may even decide to overlay geographic and demographic data to find more insights within your territory.
Additionally, each sales rep can create reports to analyze their own territories. This way, they can measure their performance against their targets and quotas. These reports can also be conveniently shared with sales managers and with the rest of the team.
Use Data Visualization to Search for Hidden Insights
Every moment, massive amounts of data are being generated. In 2015, the global annual rate of data production was 5.6 Zettabytes. Even with all this data, sales teams will not get the valuable insights they need without a method for filtering through that data.
This is why it's important to use data visualization tools like territory mapping software. It goes without saying that human eyes can grasp information more easily with visuals than with texts. Yet unfortunately, most reports are filled with static tables and charts that just don't provide helpful and clear insights to those who need them.
Data visualization lets decision makers see the connections between multi-dimensional sets of data. With visual data discovery, companies can find the information they need, when they need it. Users can view connections between business performance and overall operations. If your reps need to gain 10 more accounts in a certain vertical, your sales territory mapping software can help them achieve that goal.
Achieve Better-Qualified Sales Leads
Through the use of territory mapping software, you can easily access and take advantage of each territory—which means more time can be spent on leads and prospects. Every sales manager and rep understands the importance of leads, especially warm leads. Calling on cold leads is never anyone's ideal choice.
That said, every company can always use more sales—since this means an increase in profits. When your sales reps can spend less time figuring out their territory and more time generating leads, everyone benefits. Reps can then target prospects based on demographics, location, job title, industry, and more.
This type of data-driven segmentation gives the sales reps more insight. Then, they can cultivate highly relevant marketing messages that bring results.
Make Quick Updates as Needed
If your data changes, you can easily update your territory map at any time. Consumer and competitor data can fluctuate. As a result, you and your territory must remain flexible. To illustrate, there can be changes in attributes including:
- Consumer behavior
- Competition growth
- Population
- Demographics
- Industries
It's important to keep up with these changes in order to succeed in each territory. With territory mapping software, you can make changes quickly on an as-needed basis by integrating third-party data sources—without having to go back to square one.
Create the Geography of Your Choice
There are many ways to map a territory. It always starts with understanding your market. For example, you should know what types of customers and businesses to target. You also need to know the size of the businesses you want to target and its asset size. Finally, it comes down to drawing your borders.
You can set geographic territories by city and state. With territory mapping software, you can get a view of all your potential prospects overlaid on a map that is based on location. This type of visual aid is crucial for setting your territories in areas that are unfamiliar.
If your company sells different products and services based on industry, then it makes sense to map your territory by industry. You can also divide your territory based on the buying power of the prospect or client. This might include larger accounts that require sales reps who have expertise in closing large deals.
After a deal is closed, the account might be farmed by another account team—leaving the large-account rep more time to pursue other large deals. On the other hand, sales reps who can hunt may fare better managing territories with SMB companies. You can then designate prospects based on their journey through the sales funnel. Of course, as you don't have to figure this all out on your own. you can set it and forget it with territory mapping software.
Working in a data-intensive environment requires the right software to make sense of it all. Territory mapping software is the only way to create balanced, profitable, and optimized territories that bring in maximum revenue and keep your sales reps happy.
