Many sales organizations are faced with the underutilization of their sales assets, meaning the potential of available resources, both sales reps and territories, are not being used to their fullest.
Every year, companies spend money on tools and software meant to accel-erate the overall sales process; however, without the ability to effectively analyze current productivity or a clear vision on an exact direction to grow, the impact can be significant and can manifest itself through a number of symptoms, including:
With technology options around every corner, sales organizations today are faced with a serious challenge, how to be more efficient in growing sales. Too many leaders overlook the full picture of sales utilization and the impact it has on building an effective sales organization. Sales managers with a clear understanding of their current reps and can visualize potential oppor-tunities, may have the best opportunity to maximize sales.
Companies already have customer data in one form or another, but chances are, it is being underutilized. It’s impossible to know which direc-tion to take your sales territory if you don’t know where it has been, or where it is presently at. Sales analytics are important for guiding the sales team, making improvements, and tracking activity.
Creating a more effective sales team may not come with a set of instruc-tions, but having the right data and right context, coupled with the right experience, can help management assess their current situation to deter-mine whether changes will drive improvements in sales utilization.
With all of this improved technology, most sales leaders do not suffer from a lack of metrics, however, as much as they struggle to gain the best insights from them. By visualizing the data, sales managers can make bet-ter informed decisions, instead of “educated guesses”, when inbet-terpreting and implementing changes.
Most companies have a CRM (customer relationship management) appli-cation that sales reps use to track leads, prospects, accounts and deals. For smaller businesses with no CRM system, at the very least, customer infor-mation can be exported from the accounting software.
Customer data can be leveraged to immediately impact your sales ef-fectiveness. By mapping, profiling and segmenting your current customer data, you can identify the most profitable targets. With this knowledge, you can then find and focus on new prospects most like your best and most profitable customers.
When analyzing current performance, track and measure against these metrics:
1.Customer Win Rate.
What percentage of opportunities are you closing in each territory? What could account for the differences, and how can you capitalize on them?
2.Number of Leads and Opportunities.
The quantity of leads that you are converting in specific territories can be a key indicator of how much demand your product or service is generating in that market. Furthermore, by analyzing the number of those leads that become op-portunities, you can often get an even more accurate picture of how much over-all market potential exists in that space for your organization.
3.Average and Median Opportunity Age.
By analyzing the amount of time that sales opportunities are open for different products, sales teams, reps and even geographies, you can more accurately un-derstand the market potential.
4.Existing Pipeline and Forecast.
What type of revenue potential exists in your current pipeline? How much did you forecast? Do the two align? If not, it is easy to make some very quick dis-coveries about the market potential in those territories.
Third-Party Data
In addition, third-party data such as counts of businesses by type, socio-economic and population demographics are readily available to provide excellent insight into your market penetration to help you optimize your sales team’s market coverage and identify missed opportunities.
This information coupled with your own historical sales revenue data will help sales managers establish aggressive yet achievable sales goals and assign sales quotas.
So, for example, the sales quotas could be calculated as follows:
Average Account Revenue (in $) * Total # of Target Accounts in Territory * Target Market Penetration % = Sales Quota (in $)
Are your sales reps always working to uncover new business? Do you have a way of tracking to really know if they are? Probably not, especially in established territories where a rep has been accustomed to working their “best” accounts. Sometimes “best” is just “easy”. In many territories, a rep can consistently exceed quota by focusing their efforts on the “easy accounts,” which is great…for the rep. As a result, the company misses out on potential sales opportunities.
Before reorganizing sales territories, analyze your entire existing cus-tomer base against these metrics:
How do they spend? Why do they spend? When do they spend?
After segmenting your customers, analyze and determine which of these ele-ments drives your customers to spend on your business. Review both your CRM and historical customer billings to analyze the customer spend by segment. The key is to find the trend in customer spending.
Once you have a clear understanding of your customer coverage, you are better able to re-align your territories and re-assign accounts to sales reps with more call capacity resulting in an increase in productivity, sales and profits!
Do some members of your sales team complain that their counterparts’ territories are stronger, have more potential business, or are less competi-tive? The grass is always greener, right? Well, this is may be true, but you cannot really know unless you use some metrics to define territories and ensure they are fairly balanced.
Creating well-defined territories that are balanced and fair combines both your company’s metrics with third party data. This combination of in-corporating market data adds an additional layer to fully understand a ter-ritory’s potential for each sales rep.
In order to properly map and apply all of your information to your Sales Territories, you must first calculate the territory’s potential. The existing customer base plus your pipeline potentials plus prospects (who are de-rived from third party data).
Let’s consider a hypothetical technology company who sells software to professional services.
This company may choose to define their sales territories by grouping to-gether ZIP Codes based on the count of target accounts. By summarizing the total number of professional services offices by ZIP Code, they can then balance their sales territories by the total number of accounts to effectively align their territories. Or, if perhaps the size of each office is a better indi-cator of the sales opportunity (i.e. you could sell more software licenses in-to offices with more professional services employees), you could use a combination of the total count of offices and the employee count to bal-ance the territories.
Regardless of how you decide to define your opportunity, if each sales rep had roughly the same amount of prospective business (±10%) imagine how much more revenue you could generate.
On top of that, you level the playing field and see who your top perform-ers really are.
Some doors aren’t worth approaching. Is your sales team focused on cus-tomers with the highest potential to buy your solution? Or do they call on low value prospects and saturated customers? Clearly define your target audience first.
With business data providers like Dun & Bradstreet you can specify cri-teria for specific industries and build a call list within territory boundaries.
This will help sales managers eliminate some potential conflict between reps. You won’t eliminate all conflict but it will increase the contrast of the “grey areas”.
When your reps attention is focused on a specific list and servicing current accounts they become more efficient in generating more business.
Sales territory alignment is one of the most frequently overlooked sales force productivity areas. Many sales forces are losing millions of dollars each year because of territory imbalances.
Travel activities for sales reps add up to 6.6 hours per week, or 13% of the time. Typically outside reps make 17 trips per week of 23 minutes each. When asked about their ideal time, this activity is one where they would prefer to spend much less time, ideally only about 3 hours per week.
It's hard to schedule an efficient day with a calendar, a map, and your customer data all in different programs.
Many geographic data mapping services on the market will calculate travel times for you. A fully optimized territory takes into account your da-ta plus the travel time of reps. This will reduce non-productive windshield time by allowing your reps to spend more time efficiently prospecting, cre-ating value for their customers, and closing business.
Stop the time-consuming driving and spend more time getting things done.
Now as obvious as these strategies may seem, the not-so-obvious conclusion is
The GeoMetrx Territory Manager is a solution that enables an entire organi-zation to Align, Balance and Optimize sales territories by utilizing the 5 strategies above. GeoMetrx is a ‘software as a service’ application that is 100% web-based and offers easy-to-use wizard interface. You don’t have to be an expert mapping system specialist. Many of our clients who use GeoMetrx are also spending the majority of their time managing a sales force.
