Building a Territory Plan

If you find yourself with some extra time at this very slow time of the year, think about what you can do to position yourself going in to the New Year. Take this time to build your plans for next year – independently. Don’t rely on your manager to tell you what needs to be done. Make a plan yourself. A well though-out territory plan will help you build momentum early in the year.

All good plans start by asking three basic questions: Where are we now? Where are we going? How are we going to get there? A territory plan is no different. _____________________________________________________________________________

Pardon the interruption, but I wanted you to know that my new book, Common Sense Sales, is now available at Amazon.com.  You can click HERE to find it.  There is more information on the right hand side of the screen regarding it and my first book, Click “Send” and Sell.  Be sure to check them out.
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To answer the first question, “Where are we now?”, take a look at your territory and understand what companies are buying from you - or have bought from you. What kind of companies were they? Retailers? Manufacturers? Service companies? Banks? How large are they? How many employees, locations, or square footage? This kind of work is indispensible when creating a territory plan. Leveraging prior success in specific industries and company sizes can make your work much easier in the coming year.

Next, apply some metrics against the data that you have accumulated. Are there consistencies around them? Maybe you generated 80% of your sales from 20% of your customers. What do those 20% all have in common? Go back to the figures above and do some further digging. Is there a revenue-per-employee number that is consistent across your top customers? Do they export more goods, occupy more or less square footage or treat fewer high-risk patients? Try to find some commonality in the data so that you can hone your upcoming efforts.

Your work here should culminate in understanding who buys from you by industry, location, company size and the like.

Next question, “Where are we going?”. Once you have identified your top few industries or company types, take stock of how many of those same kinds of companies are in your territory. What kind of penetration have you been able to achieve? How many similar companies are still available to call on? Where are they located? Are there clusters? Work to identify them and begin to create a mental map of how you plan to spend your time in the year ahead. If your territory includes large, publicly traded companies, use their filings to determine if there are high growth divisions located in your territory.

Your job now is to create a list of target prospects. This kind of work can be particularly challenging if you call on small to mid-sized companies. Sources for this information will be largely web-based, with Hoovers containing some great summary reports that you can use to start your research. Another source of information is your shoes! Go in to large office buildings and jot down the names of companies on their welcome signage located in the lobby. A sales rep and I once spent an entire day walking in to large office complexes writing down company names and he had enough data to keep him selling for several weeks. Do you keep driving by a building with an unknown company name on the outside? Look them up on the web!

This part of the planning process should yield a list of prospects that will keep you busy in the coming months. And by busy, I mean prospecting and closing business, not just research.

The last question, “How are we going to get there?”. This is a great time to determine what it took to close new business in the prior year. If you use your CRM to log every call, email and such, you have a great repository of information. One study that I conducted after about six months of selling was that it took about eight touches to close a deal. That was helpful information for me as I looked towards building my plan. I also had data on how many touches it took to have a meaningful conversation; how many conversations to set an appointment; how many appointments to get a demo; how many demos to close a sale; and so on.

If you don’t have that level of data, you are bound to have some high level information about what it takes to close business. I would suggest that you take a look at an article that I posted called,”How Much Pipeline is Enough?”. In it you will learn how much pipeline and activity you will need to hit your numbers.

This part of the plan will give you insight in to the number of accounts that you will need to penetrate in order to achieve your sales goals. And, make sure that you have three to five times the number of accounts needed. You won’t hit a sale with every company.

Creating a territory plan can be a daunting task, but it is worth the time. In an earlier blog, I wrote about the best rep I ever worked with (HERE). He spent his entire Thanksgiving weekend planning his territory. That’s commitment.

If you take the time to plan create a territory plan, you’ll have a roadmap for success. Otherwise you’re allowing chance and fate to drive your success. Very risky.