sample sales territory business plan

5 Steps to Create a Sales Territory Plan + Templates + Examples

• February 5, 2024

Are you ready to revolutionize your sales approach? 

This isn’t just another article; it’s your key to mastering sales territory planning. 

In the competitive world of sales, having a well-crafted territory plan isn’t just nice to have – it’s essential . 

This guide is packed with insights and strategies that could mean the difference between meeting your targets and exceeding them. 

We’re revealing the secrets to effective territory management , the kind that transforms good salespeople into great ones. 

By missing out on this, you’re leaving untapped potential on the table. 

Let’s dive in and discover how to enhance your sales game, outperform your competition, and achieve results you’ve only dreamed of.

What is a Sales Territory?

A sales territory refers to a specific geographical area or group of customers that a sales team or individual salesperson manages. 

Think of it as your playing field in the world of sales. In this territory, you’re in charge of all the selling activities, from initial contact to closing deals. It’s not just about where you sell, but also who you sell to .

Effective sales territory planning ensures that you’re targeting the right customers and making the most out of your area. It’s a blend of strategy and practicality, where designing sales territories becomes a key part of your success. 

Managing a sales territory means you’re at the helm, steering your sales strategy and making sure your territory sales plan is on track. It’s like being the captain of your own ship, navigating through the market’s waters. 

When done right, this approach leads to efficient territory management, helping you grow your business and achieve your sales objectives . Remember, every territory is unique, so tailoring your approach to fit its specific needs is crucial.

Step 1: Territory Analysis

Territory analysis is your first crucial step in formulating a sales territory plan. This involves a detailed exploration of your assigned area , much like a detective uncovering insights. Focus on understanding the demographics and market opportunities. 

Conduct a SWOT analysis tailored to your sales territory to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This critical analysis lays the groundwork for your entire sales strategy, helping you identify key areas for potential growth and improvement. 

By thoroughly understanding your territory, you’re better equipped to plan and achieve your sales objectives effectively.

Best Practices in Analyzing Your Territory

When it comes to analyzing your sales territory, diving in with a clear plan is key. This is where the best practices in territory analysis come into play. These are your golden rules, guiding you to make the most out of your sales territory planning. It’s like having a roadmap in the complex world of sales territory management.

Here are the best practices to keep in mind:

• Understand Your Market : Get to know who's buying what in your area. It's all about grasping the customer demographics and behavior.
• Evaluate Your Competition : Keep an eye on who you're up against. Knowing your competitors helps you strategize better.
• Identify Opportunities for Growth : Look for untapped markets or potential areas for expansion within your territory.
• Use SWOT Analysis : Assess the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in your territory. It's an invaluable tool for strategic planning.
• Leverage Data and Tools : Utilize data analytics and territory mapping tools. They're like your high-tech compass in navigating the sales landscape.
• Set Clear, Achievable Goals : Based on your analysis, set realistic and measurable targets.

Remember, analyzing your territory effectively sets the stage for a successful sales strategy. It’s all about being thorough, strategic, and proactive. The better you understand your territory, the better your chances of hitting those sales targets.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Sales Territories

This step in your sales journey is setting up your sales territories, a pivotal move in your territory planning strategy. It’s like laying the groundwork for a successful sales campaign. 

Here, you’re not just mapping areas; you’re strategically designing sales territories to maximize efficiency and reach.

Consider these steps:

• Define Territory Boundaries : Start by establishing clear boundaries for each territory. This helps in creating manageable and focused areas for your sales efforts.
• Analyze Customer Distribution : Look at where your customers are located to ensure your sales resources are targeting the right areas.
• Assess Market Potential : Evaluate the market potential in each territory. This involves understanding the demand and growth opportunities in each area.
• Balance Workload : Make sure each territory has a balanced workload. This is crucial for maintaining efficiency and preventing burnout.
• Align with Sales Goals : Each territory should support your overall sales objectives, contributing to the larger goals of your sales strategy.

This step is crucial for effective sales territory management. It’s about making sure every area has what it needs to succeed. Done right, it sets the stage for achieving your sales targets, ensuring each part of your sales territory is primed for success.

Step 3: Developing a Territory Business Plan and Sales Strategy

This step is where you dive into developing a territory business plan and crafting your sales strategy. This is where your planning takes shape, turning analysis and structure into actionable goals . It’s about plotting your course to sales success. 

You’ll start by setting clear, specific objectives for your sales territory. Think about what you want to achieve and how you’ll get there. Next, you’ll tailor your sales tactics to fit the unique needs of your territory. 

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; it’s about customizing your strategy to maximize your territory’s potential . You’ll also need to think about resource allocation. This means deciding where to focus your time and efforts for the best results. And don’t forget about monitoring progress. 

Keeping track of your achievements and setbacks will help you adjust your strategy as needed. In essence, this step is your blueprint for territory success, guiding your actions and decisions towards your sales goals.

Step 4: Implementing and Managing Your Sales Territory

This step is about putting your sales territory plan into motion. This is the execution phase, where you activate your strategies . 

Begin by launching marketing campaigns and reaching out to customers. Your focus is on effectively deploying your sales team to the right places at the right times. As you manage your territory, stay responsive to customer needs and adapt to market changes quickly . 

This stage is critical for seeing your plan take effect and for setting the stage for reaching your sales targets. Successful implementation and management of your sales territory are key to driving growth and staying competitive.

Step 5: Measuring and Adjusting the Plan

The last step is all about measuring and adjusting your plan. Once you’ve set your sales territory strategy in motion, it’s crucial to keep track of how things are going . Think of this as the fine-tuning stage. 

You’re not just running with a plan; you’re constantly evaluating and tweaking it for better results. Start by monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs). These are your checkpoints to ensure you’re on the right path.

Key KPIs to track include:

• Sales Volume : Check if sales are meeting your targets.
• Customer Acquisition Rates : Measure how effectively you're gaining new customers.
• Customer Retention Rates : Track how well you're keeping existing customers.
• Revenue Growth : Monitor the growth in revenue from your territory.
• Market Share : See how your share in the market is evolving.

If the numbers aren’t adding up, it’s time to adjust your sails. This might mean reallocating resources, changing your sales approach, or even revising your targets. 

Remember, flexibility is key in sales territory management. It’s about responding swiftly to market changes and customer feedback. By measuring and adjusting, you ensure that your sales territory plan remains effective and aligned with your overall business goals.

Sales Territory Plan Templates and Examples

Creating a top-notch sales territory plan can be much easier when you have the right templates and examples at your disposal. Think of these as your cheat sheets to success.

For New Market Entries

When entering a new market, focus on detailed market analysis and initial customer engagement strategies. Your plan should help you understand the unique demographic traits, preferences, and economic conditions of the new area. 

Tailor your approach to align with these insights, identifying effective marketing channels and initial sales tactics. This stage is about establishing a strong foothold and making a positive first impression in an unfamiliar market.

Here’s a template:

For Growing Existing Markets

To expand in an existing market, emphasize customer retention and growth. Your strategy should include personalized marketing, loyalty programs, and exceptional customer service. 

Look for untapped segments within the market, considering product diversification or new sales channels. The goal is to solidify and expand your presence, building on existing customer relationships while attracting new clientele.

For Reviving Underperforming Territories

For underperforming territories, adopt a focused turnaround strategy. Conduct a thorough analysis to pinpoint the causes of poor performance. Reevaluate your market positioning, sales approach, and customer engagement tactics. 

The plan should guide you in implementing innovative strategies to revitalize your presence in these areas, aiming to boost sales and improve overall territory performance.

Advanced Strategies and Future Trends in Territory Planning

Staying ahead in territory planning means embracing advanced strategies and keeping an eye on future trends. It’s about being one step ahead in the game. As you refine your approach, consider these cutting-edge tactics:

• Data-Driven Decision Making : Leverage big data and analytics to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and market trends.
• AI and Machine Learning : Use AI tools to predict market changes and customer needs, enhancing your strategy's responsiveness.
• Customized Customer Experiences : Tailor your sales and marketing efforts to provide personalized experiences for each customer segment.
• Integration of Digital Platforms : Utilize digital tools for more efficient territory management and customer engagement.
• Sustainability Focus : Incorporate eco-friendly practices and products to align with growing environmental concerns.

These strategies not only keep you competitive but also position you as a forward-thinking leader in territory planning. Embracing these trends ensures that your sales territory plan stays relevant and effective in an ever-evolving market landscape. 

Remember, the future of territory planning is about being adaptable, innovative, and customer-centric.

Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Territory Plan

When it comes to crafting a stellar sales territory plan, you might have a few questions up your sleeve. Let’s tackle some common queries that we haven’t touched on yet.

How do you balance territories to ensure fairness among sales reps?

Balancing territories is key to keeping your sales team motivated and fair. Start by analyzing customer potential and the workload required in each territory . Use data to assess factors like the number of potential customers, average sales cycle length, and historical sales data. 

Then, aim to distribute these factors evenly among territories. This might mean dividing a large, high-potential area into smaller sections or combining smaller, lower-potential areas. Regular reviews and adjustments are essential to maintain balance as market conditions and team dynamics change.

What's the role of technology in sales territory planning?

Technology is a game-changer in sales territory planning. With advanced CRM systems , you can track customer interactions, sales patterns, and market trends with precision. 

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mapping software help in visualizing territories and optimizing routes for sales reps. AI and machine learning can forecast sales trends and identify untapped market opportunities. 

Embracing these technologies leads to more informed decisions, greater efficiency, and enhanced sales performance.

Can a sales territory plan be too detailed?

While detail is crucial in a sales territory plan, there’s a fine line between thorough and overly complicated. A plan that’s too detailed can become rigid and difficult to adapt to market changes. 

The key is to strike a balance – provide enough detail to guide your sales team but leave room for flexibility. Include clear objectives, strategies, and KPIs, but be open to adjustments based on real-time market feedback and sales performance. 

A flexible, adaptable plan is often more effective than one that’s meticulously detailed.

Key Takeaways in Mastering Sales Territory Plan

Let’s quickly recap our journey in creating a successful sales territory plan. It all starts with thorough territory analysis – getting to know your area inside out . 

Then, you move on to setting up your territories, carefully mapping each area to ensure success. The next phase involves developing a strategic business plan, which is your roadmap for achieving sales targets .

The real action begins with implementing and managing your plan, ensuring every strategy is effectively put into practice . Equally important is measuring and adjusting your plan to keep up with market changes and performance.

We also touched on the importance of using specific templates and examples for different scenarios, like new market entries or reviving lagging territories. Advanced strategies like leveraging technology and data are crucial for staying ahead.

Lastly, we tackled some common questions, emphasizing the need for balance , the role of technology, and avoiding overly detailed plans.

In short, a great sales territory plan is all about strategic planning, effective execution, and ongoing adaptation. Keep these points in mind, and you’ll be on track to hitting those sales targets.

Edgar Abong

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Last Updated on February 5, 2024 by Edgar Abong

• June 24, 2024

Profitable Sales Territory Plans (7-Step Template + Examples)

• Sales Productivity , Sales Prospecting

WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM'S PERFORMANCE?

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Sales organizations are more challenged than ever with a connected world, complex offerings, and what seems like an endless world of prospects. Without a strong sales territory plan, sales teams may feel all over the place, and as a result may not be producing the best results for your customers or your organization.

If you’re looking to maximize sales productivity and the value that your sales team brings to customers, it may be time to review and enhance your sales territory plan.

Good sales territory planning provides a framework to measure sales potential, set goals, and focus your team’s sales efforts for maximum success. It provides your sales team the guidance to properly identify and understand customers and prospects, assess and measure value, and support customers in a way that leads to loyalty.

Table of Contents

What is Sales Territory Planning   Benefits of Sales Territory Planning Factors to Consider When Planning Sales Territories 7 Steps to Writing a Successful Sales Territory Plan 5 Sales Territory Management Best Practices to Follow Essential Tools to Plan Your Sales Territories 5 Ways to Validate a Sales Territory Business Plan

What is Sales Territory Planning?

Territory planning is the process of creating a plan to ensure your sales team targets the right customers (and the most profitable ones).

Historically, most territories were broken down by geography, but in today’s connected world, sales territories can also be divided in many ways, including:

• Sales potential
• Customer type

With a clearly defined territory, sales teams can work strategically to address the needs of their assigned market. A strong sales territory plan allows you to:

• Ensure your sales team’s efforts are focused on the who , what , when , where and why that offer the strongest return on investment.
• Align salespeople to the regions, segments, and/or verticals best suited for their background and expertise.
• Partner intelligently across company teams to drive corporate objectives
• Optimize customer experience by aligning accounts with sales teams that understand their unique challenges and opportunities.
• Set the stage for long-term solid customer and market relationships.

Benefits of Sales Territory Planning

If you’re doubting the value of a strong sales territory plan, consider these inarguable benefits:

More time spent selling

A strong territory plan allows organizations to maximize their sales momentum by aligning the right sales teams to the right opportunities. Studies by industry analysts consistently show a decline in sales productivity due to factors such as extensive traveling, the need to learn and understand new segments, and administrative overhead.

With a clear sales territory plan based on geography and sector, salespeople can spend less time traveling and preparing for customer engagements and more time working directly with customers.

Better customer service

By aligning your salespeople to a set of accounts that aligns to their background, expertise, and geography, they are better able to understand customer needs and build solutions that align. With consistent territories, salespeople can build long-term relationships, leading to higher customer loyalty and repeat business.

Balanced workloads

Workload is measured in time and effort required to adequately manage all accounts in a given territory. A strong territory plan compares workloads and designs territories so that each salesperson is at full capacity, maximizing their potential.

To maximize rep production, you need to do some due diligence when it comes to assigning balanced territories.

Factors to Consider When Planning Sales Territories

When segmenting territories among your reps, you want to make sure they’re allocated fairly. To ensure this, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the workload equally divvied up between each member of the team?
• Does the territory design provide equal compensation opportunities?
• Is there a good mix of existing and new accounts per territory?
• Does the territory route allow easy travel time management?

Once you’re able to answer the questions above, it’s time to consider:

1 | Revenue Source

Current Customers. Where are your best customers and prospects located? Geographic and industry-based clusters are the most common focus because it’s easier to get new customers in an area with existing customers. Historical sales data will become your new best friend as it’s the best predictor of future success.

A sales tracking software will give you a complete history of this data.

Inbound Leads. When inbound leads convert, focus on the demographics such as geography, industry and size. Then, build a strategy to divide them as evenly as possible across your sales force.

The focus needs to be on revenue generated from inbound leads as opposed to volume of leads.

Outbound Prospecting. Sales territory design for outbound efforts begins by first laying out the territories to work, then overlaying them with prospecting territories according to how you’re allocating salespeople.

For example, you assign two sales reps to each state (two territories) and one canvasser (one prospecting territory).

2 | Rank Your Team

Create a scorecard and evaluate your sales reps to identify who your top, middle, and low level performers are.

• How much is their quota ?
• Do they consistently achieve this number?
• How many current customers and prospects are in their funnel?
• How many viable prospects are located within their territory?

3 | Rank Your Territories

Most Profitable (Least Risky). Evaluate which of your territories are most successful and double down on what’s already working.

Most Growth. If you’re more focused on the long-term instead of the short-term, focus on territories that haven’t been worked yet. It’s likely to take longer to become profitable, but will generate greater growth over time.

Learning / New Markets. To establish yourself in a new market segment or determine if it’s viable, send a canvasser into this territory to accomplish a specific task. This will help determine exactly what’s needed to succeed in that market.

4 | Track and Measure Metrics

Sales metrics are invaluable in understanding the success of every sales team within the company, and entire sales department as a whole. They help you to spot trends and determine efficiencies, and inefficiencies, within the company.

With sales enablement platforms like SPOTIO, you can easily pull results for:

• Team performance in relation to your sales funnel
• Data from custom statuses and fields based on KPIs
• Graphs representing team performance, best time and day to knock, etc.
• The number of attempts it takes to establish contacts, get leads and make sales
• This data gives you the information you need in order to assign balanced workloads across your sales team.

Actionable Data and Insight

With the help of territory management technology, sales territory data helps you accurately evaluate sales performance. This information helps you design effective sales compensation plans and ensure your sales teams are performing at their maximum potential.

Clarify ownership in complex organizations

In organizations with large and complex sales teams, roles and responsibilities are often tangled. With effective sales territory planning, territories are made clear from the get-go, ensuring that salespeople are clear about their target audience and not creating confusion for the team or the customer.

Resilience to change and turnover

Organizational changes such as personnel loss, mergers, acquisitions, alliances, and relocations inevitably effect customers and internal teams. With a strong territory management plan, change is easier to manage.

A well-documented sales territory plan allows new team member’s to ramp up quickly and avoid confusion regarding roles and responsibilities.

Team cohesion and morale

Strong territory planning optimizes the role of the team. By assigning complimentary teams to each territory, you create and environment which allows team members to benefit from each other’s strengths, share workload, and also avoid conflict that arises from unclear territories and boundaries.

7 Step Plan to Write a Successful Sales Territory Business Plan

The next logical question is, where do you start? In this section, we’ll provide an overview of each planning step, along with key questions and suggestions. Depending on your offering, industry, company size, or various other factors, you may use some or all these steps when building your territory plan.

1. Analyze your business goals and objectives

The first step to drafting a solid sales territory plan is bringing clarity to your company’s landscape, defining organizational goals, and evaluating industry trends. This is a basic step to ground you and your team on what you’re trying to accomplish with your sales territory plan.

As you go through the subsequent process, you should continually refer back to this data to maintain a pulse on whether your plan accomplishes what you’ve set out to do.

To get the juices flowing, start by answering these key questions:

• What is your organization’s most current vision, mission, and north star objective ?
• What are the key trends in your industry or market?
• What pain do your offerings solve for customers?
• What are your sales goals , in numbers?
• What is your conversion rate? Based on this how many prospects should you have in your funnel at any given time to ensure that you’re meeting your sales goals?
• Are there specific products/services that you are selling more than others? Why?

2. Analyze your prospects and customers

The next step is looking deep into your customer base. In addition to understanding their businesses, challenges, and unique traits, it’s important to identify what makes them unique and what sets them apart from each other.

Key questions to ask yourself include:

• Who are your most profitable and lucrative prospects and customers defined by industry, region, product, etc.?
• What do these customers have in common?
• Which of your prospects or customers offers the most profound growth opportunities for your company?
• What are your customers buying today and what does this tell you about their challenges and opportunities?
• Are their industries you serve with success? Are their industries that you’ve had less success with?
• When customers and prospects object, what is the biggest reason why?

3. Determine your Total Addressable Market

Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the entire body of prospects and customers that fit your ideal customer profile. Traditionally, organizations use data including industry, location, size, and revenue to begin mapping their TAM.

While this is still important, technology and tooling makes it easier than ever to identify prospects within your TAM that may not be so obvious.

Using traditional and modern sources, even tools like social media, look for company and industry look-a-likes that may be a suitable candidate for your offering.

Once an ideal customer profile is solidified, the next step is to figure out how large the market opportunity is that fits the description. You may use a matrix to include a range of large and small markets which present large or small opportunities.

While estimating the size of your market used to be a struggle of guesswork and complicated calculations, there are now tools available to businesses to automate the TAM discovery process.

4. Perform a SWOT Analysis

A simple way to evaluate your position in the market is to perform a SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis. Since we all have blind spots, a SWOT analysis is best performed with the help of a broader team, including other company leadership, as well as members or your sales management and sales rep teams.

• What Strengths will you build upon?
• Which Weaknesses do you need to mitigate?
• Which Opportunities in your marketplace are you suited to take advantage of?
• What Threats in your selling environment will you defend against?

In doing this analysis, you will start to see patterns that indicate areas of your business that require more or less attention for various reasons.

For example , a strength that’s also a large opportunity may need a dedicated territory. On the other hand, an area that aligns to a serious competitive threat may require special attention to protect your company’s place in the industry.

The SWOT characteristics you identify will not always be related to revenue or geography. They may be related to more obscure things like training needs of your sales team, gaps in systems and tools, or even gaps in your products themselves.

Doing this analysis will help you be aware of other ways to think about your business and territories.

5. Determine and Document Sales Territories

Based on the work you perform in the sections above, you should have an idea of how to divide your sales territories. It’s important to document these clearly, outlining details of each territory including things like:

• Geographic Boundaries
• Industry or Segment Boundaries (including any overlap and how that is addressed)
• Revenue Boundaries
• Product Boundaries
• Anything else that may be applicable to your sales organization

6. Devise an Action Plan

Similar to the SWOT analysis, devising an action plan is a group exercise that should include various stakeholders in the company, specifically the leaders of each of your identified territories. Just as well, the action plan should be built to be nimble.

In a world where market opportunities change every day, the sales territory plan should be built to follow, ensuring that your action plan keeps up with changing opportunities and threats.

Gone are the days of an annual territory and action planning session. It’s important that change management is built into the framework to ensure your teams are not caught off guard with changes.

Within each category, you should answer the following questions:

• What is the territory’s quota?
• What is the territory’s quota stretch goal?
• What is the territory’s closed business YTD?
• What is the territory’s gap?
• How much pipeline do I have today?
• What is the territory’s pipeline gap?
• What are my goals for the year?

In addition to the overall territory, you will need to spend time looking at top accounts and where they fit in your territory plan. List top accounts and explain why they are chosen (relationships, industry fit, target profile).  For each, in one sentence, be clear and focused on the outreach strategy.

Next, create an opportunity map and make sure opportunity plans are thorough. What’s the compelling event? Why now? What’s the strategy to engage with a champion and economic buyer? What’s the mutual success plan?

Finally, close out with strategies to build your sales funnel.

In addition to being responsive to external factors, action plans should be reviewed on a quarterly basis to ensure your plan isn’t going stale unintentionally.

7. Track Performance and Stay Adaptable

Once you’ve devised and implemented your territory plan, it’s important to regularly measure success in each territory and adapt as needed.

Metric reviews should happen on a regular, defined cadence such as monthly or quarterly, and should be automated using sales performance tools to avoid making this a manual, costly, and easily avoided overhead.

Measures you put in place will vary based on your unique company situation, but some important measures include:

• Gross Sales

The most obvious measurement of sales success, gross sales is the sum of all sales that a territory carries out during a defined time frame. Gross sales is a useful metric because it shows the ability of sales professionals to make sales, regardless of what the profit margin is on those sales.

Gross Profit

This is the difference between the selling price for a product and the price the business paid to develop the solution. This measurement is important for businesses that want to encourage their sales forces to focus on high profit margins rather than just sales.

• Total Unit Sales

The aggregated number of product units sold within a particular territory, regardless of price, profit or commission. This method of measurement is useful when a company mainly sells a single type of product.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of leads or appointments that result in a sale of some kind. Sales forces with a high sales turnover number are operating at a high level of performance.

• Total Commissions

This is the amount of money the sales representatives for the territory in question take home as personal income. Although this measurement does not directly correlate to the competitiveness or degree of success of the business itself, it is effective to use as a means of motivating members of the sales force to achieve higher numbers.

• Return Customers

A sign of true development and sustainable growth in a sales territory is the tendency of buyers in that territory to come back and buy again.

For this reason, one important measurement to make is the amount of revenue or profit coming from clients who have bought before. This amount may be expressed as a gross number or as a percentage of gross sales, gross profits or commissions. 

With each review, it’s pertinent to ask your leadership whether the data being measures indicates the need for an adjustment to your territory plans. If you’re proactively monitoring and adjusting, you will maintain a plan that keeps you relevant with your customers and industry.

5 Sales Territory Management Best Practices to Follow

Managing a sales territory is a skill that needs constant development. Moreover, you should adjust and adapt to changes in your area. With summer underway, you have half a year left to grow your business. Propeller suggests four sales territory management best practices for you to implement this week.

1. Using a call rotation schedule to keep in touch with accounts

During the strategy phase, you and your team determined how often to call on each account based on their needs.  Also, note whether it is a phone call or an in-person meeting. Put these in a CRM or a calendar to keep your schedule on track.

2. Note the seasonal account trends

Another essential part of managing sales territories you addressed when building strategy was to determine which accounts were the seasonal business. It’s an excellent idea to check in before the season arrives and reconnect, so you are in touch when the account is ready to buy.

3. Keep the focus on the long-term, account-based goals.

New business is fantastic; however, it should not distract from the goals set for the targeted account-based marketing goals you set. Teaching the team to balance new business development with account management is a vital skill for any salesperson.

4. Explore new ways to divide the leads.

Many sales territory plans are set up by geography, and the leads from that area go to that sales territory rep. However, not every sales territory plan needs to be geographical; the location of the lead is not always the best way to go.

In cases where your sales reps do not have in-person meetings, you can try dividing new leads based on account type (i.e., verticals) or the referral source. Some people divide leads based on the product in which the lead is interested or by the size of the account.

5. Look for cross-selling opportunities.

Analyze the products that an account buys and look for natural partner-products or services, i.e., the “Would you like fries with that?” strategy. Many times, customers might not realize that you offer the full suite of products and services and can make their lives easier by ordering from one supplier.

Essential Tools to Plan Your Sales Territories

Like any job, when you are planning sales territories, you need to have the right tools. The right tools will help you plan, build, and execute a sales territory plan. There is a multitude of options available.  Here are three essentials you need to set yourself up for success, improve productivity and close the best deals.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a how your company keeps track of its customer information and history. Many CRM applications also offer data analysis to help companies with customer retention and account growth. CRM compile data from several sources, including live chat, social media, and email correspondence, among others.

CRM is a significant source for successful sales territory planning.

Spreadsheet: Spreadsheets are data organizers in a tab form that takes data entered in cells and leverages that into different calculations and values, including simple math as well as complex financial and statistical figures. When you have data from various sources, such as a CRM and online sources as an example, you can assemble all the data available in a spreadsheet for quick access and comprehensive analysis.

GPS: Geo Productivity Software (GPS) are software applications that combine standard geolocation and route optimization functions with CRM data to help salespeople address their most relevant and profitable account first. Moreover, the features help salespeople optimize their selling time with customers instead of traveling to and from customers.

Some of the more sophisticated systems incorporate traffic and weather in the optimization of the scheduling.

A 7-Step Template to Create Profitable Sales Territory Plans

Without a strong sales territory plan, your sales team might become disorganized. As a result, you reps may not produce the best results for your customers or your organization. This is obviously a problem. Fortunately, this seven-step template is the answer! Simply follow the process we outline below to build a profitable sales territory business plan.

1. Analyze Your Business Goals

What do you want your sales territory business plan to achieve? Answer the seven questions below to help define and understand your organization’s objectives in this area:

• What is our current vision?
• What are key trends in our industry?
• What pain do we solve for customers?
• What are our sales goals, in numbers?
• What is our current conversion rate?
• How many prospects do we need?
• Which products/services are most popular?

2. Study Your Customer Base

Now that you know what your goals are, take a moment to study your customers. When you understand this unique group of people, you can serve them more effectively.

• Who are our best customers?
• Which customer segments offer the biggest growth opportunities?
• What challenges and/or opportunities do our customers meet every day?
• Which industries are we most successful in? Which are we least successful in?
• What are the most common objections our sales reps deal with?

3. Determine Your Total Addressable Market

Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the entire body of prospects and customers who fit your ideal customer profile. Use this formula to determine your company’s TAM:

• (Total # of Customers) x (Annual Contract Value) = TAM

Imagine you sell machinery to manufacturers in Texas. To find your annual contract value, multiply your average sales price ($1,000) by the average number of sales you make to each customer per year (3). In this scenario, your average contract value is $3,000.

There are roughly 17,000 manufacturers in Texas. So, your TAM would be $51M, because 17,000 manufacturers multiplied by an average contract value of $3,000 equals $51M.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Ask yourself the following four questions to perform a SWOT analysis for your organization:

• What Strengths can my company build on?
• Which Weaknesses does my company need to mitigate?
• Which Opportunities is my company able to take advantage of?
• What Threats in the industry can my company defend against?

A SWOT analysis will help you determine which sales territories need your immediate attention.

5. Document Your Sales Territories

Now it’s time to either create or redefine your sales territories. Once you’ve taken this step, document the details of each territory to keep things organized. These questions will help:

• What location boundaries define my territories?
• What industry boundaries define my territories?
• What revenue boundaries define my territories?
• What product boundaries define my territories?
• What other boundaries will define my territories?

You’ve almost finished building your profitable sales territory plan. The next thing you need to do is outline specific data points to collect and goals to strive towards for each territory you create.

• What is the territory’s quota?
• What is the territory’s quota stretch goal?
• What is the territory’s closed business YTD?
• What is the territory’s gap?
• What is the territory’s pipeline gap?

7. Track Performance

Finally, take time to evaluate your efforts on a regular basis. That way you know if your territories are performing the way you want them to, and can make necessary changes. To make things easier on your team, commit to tracking a few key metrics, like:

• Gross Profits
• Conversion Rate

5 Ways to Validate a Sales Territory Business Plan

Measuring your progress toward your goal is a crucial part of managing sales. By looking at specific parts of your process, you can determine what is working on your behalf and, perhaps more importantly, what is not.

Here are five questions you should ask to validate a sales territory business plan courtesy of Steve Andersen, President and founder of Performance Methods Incorporated (PMI).

1. Is your growth of strategic customer relationships on target?

It is critical that the customers you focus on provide new sales opportunities and growth, so ensure you picked the correct ones.

2. Are you adding to and advancing the opportunities in your pipeline?

Systems build excellent account management, and every salesperson should have a system for developing and moving accounts through their pipeline.

3. What is your close rate on targeted opportunities?

Close rates are the number of sales you get divided by the presentations you made. For example, if you close three deals for every eight presentations you make, your closing rate (or closing ratio) is 38%. The higher your close rate on targeted opportunities, then the more valid your sales territory business plan is.

4. How accurate is the sales forecast?

The ability to correctly predict the sales your territory will produce is a vital skill for managing a sales territory.

5. Do you have the right resources deployed to help your team?

Managing resources is significant in the overall strategy of a sales team. The right resources along with the right motivating activity can be the key to success in a sales territory business plan. Ensure you have both deployed appropriately.

Sales territories tells salespeople where they can do business. Proper sales territory planning by you and your team can help them take care of business. Work with your team in a collaborative way to help them target the right accounts that give them best results and you have built a foundation for success that benefits the salesperson’s, the company’s and your bottom-line.

And who doesn’t want that?

Questions or comments? Contact  SPOTIO  at  [email protected]  or comment below.

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Sales - 8 min READ

How to create a sales territory plan: A step-by-step guide

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Copper Staff

Contributors from members of the Copper team

An effective sales territory management plan can make your team more productive, improve customer coverage, increase overall sales, and reduce costs.

On the other hand, unbalanced sales territory plans and constant changes in territory division can hurt productivity as well as working relationships between clients and account managers.

That’s why it’s so important to work on your sales territory management strategy, whether you’re just starting one, or updating an existing plan.

In this post, we'll go through how to create a sales territory plan step-by-step:

• Define your market, analyze, and segment existing customers.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis.
• Set goals and create targets.
• Develop strategies.
• Review and track your results.

What is a sales territory plan?

A sales territory plan is a strategic approach to targeting the right customers, setting goals for revenue, and achieving consistent sales growth over time.

Traditionally, sales territories were divided based on geographical location, but today, they often include various industries, customer types, and other segments.

Follow these steps to create a sales territory plan:

The best way to start a sales territory plan is to first look at your customers, leads and prospects.

1. Define your market, analyze, and segment existing customers.

You should split up your customers into segments based on various characteristics such as: industry, location, purchase history and whatever else is relevant to the organization.

Ask yourself, “Who are the top customers, prospects and leads?” Categorize your customers into three groups.

• The first group should be your best customers , or the ones who require little effort.
• This is followed by the second group of customers: the ones who require a bit more work , but only those you are confident have potential revenue gain that justifies the extra work required by sales reps.
• The third group should be customers who require a lot of work .

With these groups formed, you can decide how to best use your resources in sales territory management.

To discover what key trends are in your geography or market, look over the sales data that’s already been collected. Analyze the data to find which sales territories show signs of growth and then assign them to the sales reps who would be most successful based on their strengths (more on that below).

Pro-tip: Learn about the best territory mapping software out there.

You can also use existing sales data from previous years to better understand buying patterns, but you'll have to do some additional research to learn why they are purchasing (or not), when they purchase, what drives the sale to go through and what the conversion rates are.

From this, you’ll learn how and when to reach out to your customers based on when they're likely ready to buy again, and how to really drive that sale home.

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2. Conduct a SWOT analysis.

Next, you should identify your sales team’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats with what is known as a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis is a process that identifies internal and external factors that can affect the organization’s performance. When you have a better understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can develop a stronger sales territory plan.

Everyone brings different talent and skills to the job, so it’s important to have a good understanding of what your team has to offer to help them excel and reach your goals. What strengths will you build on? What is your team good at? Where do they excel?

Consider them as a team, but also think about sales reps' individual strengths. After all, strengths aren’t just confined to team members; they reflect the organization as a whole too.

Knowing everybody’s strengths will help you decide which sales reps to assign to which territory.

Potential strengths might include:

• A diverse customer base
• An established distribution base
• An excellent service team

Which weaknesses do you need to respond to? Think about weaknesses amongst your team, but also in the sales process.

• A very large geographic area
• A lack of time to develop understanding of the products, markets and selling process
• Not understanding your customers' real needs

Opportunities

Are there any opportunities in your marketplace you can take advantage of? This data can also be discovered using CRM software.

• Untapped markets
• Under-served territories
• Growing demand for product or service

Take a look at the biggest threats in each territory and consider what threats in your selling environment you'll defend against.

Some threats you may discover include:

• Competitors fighting for the same market share
• Changes in technology
• New industry and regulatory standards

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3. set goals and create targets..

In order to make a successful sales territory plan, you must create clear parameters and realistic goals for the team as well as individual sales reps’ territories.

To do this, consolidate the trends you’ve discovered above to come up with S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based) goals and realistic targets.

Here are some questions you may ask:

How many new opportunities do you need to meet quota?

Having sales quotas are a great way to motivate sales reps, but if you find you're not meeting those quotas, you have a problem. There could be weaknesses in the sales pipeline, or you may need to seek new opportunities. In order to set goals and benchmarks for the team, consider using the top-down approach .

Using the top-down approach to sales quotas (where you set a goal for the period and then assign sales quotas to support this goal), you can go over the data from previous periods to get an idea of what your team was able to accomplish in the past and what a realistic goal for the future is. This can help you decide how many new opportunities you'll need to pursue in order to meet that goal.

Where do most of your leads come from? Which geographical regions should you concentrate on?

There are a number of ways to review customizable data using CRM software to discover where your leads are coming from. This can help you target areas of interest.

Which products or services are most profitable? Who is purchasing them?

Again, CRM software can automatically capture sales data and put it to work.

Which opportunities should we focus on?

With a CRM, you can quickly identify opportunities to help your sales team decide where to dedicate their time and resources. For example, Copper allows you to see past opportunities that are open, abandoned, lost or won in a Sales Performance report.

After learning what it is you want to achieve, you can give your team clear objectives for each territory.

4. Develop strategies to accomplish your goals.

With clear customer segments and goals in place, it’s time to create strategies to succeed.

Using the information collected so far, you can now work out an even distribution of specific regions or markets among individual reps.

The SWOT analysis mentioned above gives you a better idea of how to best assign your team members’ skills and talents to a territory.

The customer segments will help you figure out how often different accounts should be contacted and how to contact them.

Consider the following questions when creating your strategy:

• How will you go through current accounts?
• How can you leverage current successes?
• How will you generate new leads?
• Where do you need to improve?
• What does your team need in order to reach their goals and targets?

In addition, consider your resources:

• What resources do your sales reps need in order to manage their accounts?
• Which sales reps have the skills or connections you need?
• Are there any external resources you can use to help?

When creating your action plan, don’t forget to look at what your high-leverage actions are, what resources are needed, due dates and key milestones.

5. Review and track your results.

The final step in managing sales territories is to continuously review and track your results. Regular monitoring ensures that your sales territory plan remains effective and allows you to make adjustments as needed.

Key metrics to track:

• Sales Growth: Are sales increasing or decreasing in specific territories?
• Sales Rep Performance: Are all sales reps meeting their quotas and managing their leads effectively?
• Territory Costs: Are there any territories that require more resources or adjustments in strategy?

Using CRM software can significantly enhance your ability to manage sales territories by providing real-time data and insights. With tools like Copper , you can automatically compile reports, monitor progress, and fine-tune your sales territory plan to maximize efficiency.

Use a CRM to help create a killer sales territory plan.

Many organizations use CRM software to better gather data without depleting resources. CRMs allow sales reps to access insights into your pipelines, revenue forecasts , sales goals and progress and much more.

The best part: all of this data can be automatically compiled into reports used to create your sales territory plan, freeing up more time for your sales team to focus on building long-lasting relationships within their territories.

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The Complete 30-60-90 Day Plan for a New Sales Territory (Plus Templates for Interviews and Managers)

Oct 11, 2020

A new sales position can be daunting. After all, you’ve just been entrusted with a big bucket of potential, and it’s your job to turn it into gold (. . . or revenue, but you get it). It’s your name on the spreadsheet, your prospects to win or lose, and your commissions for the taking.

Working with new leadership can be daunting too, since they want to make sure that you are on the same page with the company. It’s hard to prove that you are doing your job while you are still trying to learn the ropes and your metrics need time to line up with your colleagues.

No pressure, right?

During these critical early days, a game plan is essential. An organized schedule can help you prioritize all the vital tasks and adapt to your new environment. That’s where 30-60-90 day sales plans come into the picture.

A sales plan can help you figure out exactly how you will best execute your new position. For sales reps, it also helps take the pressure off of sales management with clear timelines and goals that they can monitor. For leadership, coming up with the right sales plan will make sure that sales reps are completing what they need to be successful and ensures that everyone is on the same page.

We’re going to show you how to build out a strategy that will help you go from getting the territory to absolutely crushing it in just three months . And the best part is, you even will know when to implement what .

Here’s what you need to know about 90 days sales plan and 30-60-90 day sales templates to get you started.

Table of Contents

1. What Is a 30-60-90 Day Plan?

2. When to Use a 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan

3. How Long Should a 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Be?

4. 30-60-90 Day Plan Templates for Better Sales

Template #1: 30-60-90 Day Plan for an Interview

Template #2: 30-60-90 day plan for a new sales territory, template #3: 30-60-90 day plan for managing a new team.

5. Day 91: What Now?

What Is a 30-60-90 Territory Plan?

Simply put, a 30-60-90 plan is when you strategize action steps and goals to accomplish in the first 30, 60, and 90 days of a new sales territory or position.

The plan is helpful not only for keeping yourself focused on specific targets but also for keeping your manager in the loop. The truth is, managers love 30-60-90 plans. Often, hiring managers will even ask potential sales reps to lay one out in their interview process. It’s good stuff.

There’s not a single “right way” to do these plans. But generally, they’re broken down like this:

• Days 1 through 30: Learn all you can
• Days 31 through 60: Put a plan into action
• Days 61 through 90: Make the plan better

Getting down to the details and being on the same page with your manager is a fantastic way to avoid stresses down the road for all parties. For example, if your manager knows you have a big push planned for days 31 to 60, then they’ll be able to take a breath and give you a bit more space to get acquainted with your territory from 1 to 30.

Alright, now that you know what we’re talking about, let’s get into it.

When to Use a 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan

A 30-60-90 day plan is useful for mapping out the transitions in your career. Whether starting, taking on new responsibilities, or ready for growth, you can tailor your plan to meet whatever your environment. How you want to structure your sales plan depends heavily on what you want to use it to achieve. Some of the most common times that a sales plan is used include:

Interviewing for a New Sales Position

You nailed the initial interviews, have the experience and references to land a great sales job. As you enter the final round of interviews, though, you’ll be up against other candidates that are just as likable and qualified as you. A sales plan is a great way to highlight exactly what you can bring to their company.

It’s common for hiring managers to ask about a sales plan, and it’s a critical way for you to distinguish yourself from the other candidates. Often, the manager may casually ask what your plan is for the first 30, 60,  and 90 days on the job. In most cases, you would benefit from having a formal plan drawn up to show that you have carefully thought through how you will tackle the job.  Done well, a sales plan will enable your hiring manager to view you in your position and what would make you excel in the company.

On a New Job

Another situation that you may find yourself crafting a sales plan is early into a new job, typically during the first week. Outlining your 30-60-90 day plan will allow you to communicate with leadership so they understand how you operate and how they can best support you during the onboarding and ramp-up process. It is also a chance for you to discuss how your goals align with the company goals and discuss any questions or concerns you have about your new role.

Once you start a new job, you’ll have a clearer picture of the company’s goals to align your sales plan. Even if you came up with a sales plan during the interview process, it is time to review your plan in light of your better understanding of your new company.

Starting a new job can be overwhelming. Even if you are not required to create a sales plan when you start at a company, creating one for yourself might provide you with the clarity and vision you need to excel as quickly as possible.

Assignment to a New Territory

Sales is fluid, and even the most senior reps may find change necessary during their careers. Whether a change in a territory or learning new technology, you will likely find yourself starting over again while working for the same company.

A 30-60-90 sales plan during this time can be critical to ensure your success during the transition. It can offer organization and clarity necessary so you can concentrate on what is important and make things as smooth as possible.

If you’ve been assigned to a new territory or part of your region has shifted, you’ll want to develop a 30-60-90 day plan to get ahead of it. It’s no easy task to become acquainted with a new market. Sometimes managers will require this, but if not, you should come up with a focused plan to get organized.

Create a Leadership Strategy

Entering a company as a leader can be a challenging prospect. Each company has its own unique goals, objectives, and values that leaders need to learn. Plus, every team has a different dynamic with unique strengths and weaknesses. Even experienced managers and leaders need time to understand these before making changes. However, they may feel pressure to make immediate improvements to establish their worth.

A 30-60-90 plan is a valuable tool for new managers to establish themselves. It allows them to stay on the same page with the rest of leadership and create a strategy for making improvements. The right strategy will allow them time to understand the dynamics of the company and team they will lead so that they can manage effectively.

Leveling Up Sales Skills

Success in sales does not happen by accident. It takes intentionality and drive to make sure you are hitting not only your quotas but your own professional goals as well.

It’s not a bad idea to implement these kinds of plans on a semi-regular basis. You can use a 30-60-90 plan to audit the way you’re approaching your customers and improve upon your messaging. It’s especially helpful during times of change — for instance, during an economic downturn or when your organization is adjusting their product/market fit is an excellent time to use a 30-60-90 plan.

Whether you want to move up in your company or just want a larger commission check, a sales plan can help you start making your dreams a reality.

How Long Should a 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Be?

The length of a sales plan can vary widely. The average length typically spans anywhere from 3-8 pages.

How in-depth should your plan be? It depends on what you are using your plan for. If you have a new position with multiple responsibilities, you might benefit from a longer document that can tackle your goals and plans for each part of the job. For an interview, a shorter plan would be better to keep your answer from being long and rambling (a classic interview mistake).

Your sales plan should be as long as you need it to be. Don’t feel pressured to make it longer if there is not as much to tackle, but make sure that it is adequate to address all of your needs.

30-60-90 Day Plan Templates for Better Sales

Now that we’ve discussed the general outline of a sales plan, it’s time to dive into what that means specifically. We have broken down what your plan should look like based on what you are using it to accomplish.

Some of the most common templates for 30-60-90 day sales plans include:

A 30-60-90 day sales plan is one of the best ways to prepare yourself for your big interview. Even if the hiring manager doesn’t ask about your plan, it is a critical opportunity for you to research and strategize to be prepared.

Days 1-30: Gain an Understanding of the Company Values and Analyze Your Market

Coming up with the right sales plan from scratch is all about defining what success looks like in the beginning.

When it comes to a sales plan for an interview, it takes some more creative thinking to define and segment your goals. It is especially challenging because you most likely have not received clear company goals to outline.

However, you can still get a general outline to differentiate yourself from the other candidates. Take a careful look at the job description to find the necessary responsibility and qualifications for the position. What is emphasized in the description and qualifications? Is there any overlap in the two that seem significant? You can use these to distinguish goals to create an effective plan.

At its most basic, your first 30 days should include:

• Completing company training to learn valuable skills and their objectives . This goes beyond simply completing a training course and getting insights into your company and team’s high-level priorities. Understand their objectives for the future and the core goals to get you there.
• Gain an in-depth understanding of the company products or services. Your goal should be to gain mastery as soon as possible to help you advise customers and provide valuable information.
• Understand. who your target market is. Research to find out more about them. This is the time, for example, to research buyer personas and how your product or service uniquely serves them.
• Create connections in your organization . Not only should you be connecting with your sales team, but also key players for your customers. For example, you should get to know customer service and IT to create one comprehensive team for your clients.

Incorporating all of these elements should give you the chance to schedule weekly checkpoints to spend 1:1 time with a mentor or leadership to report on your progress. It is also a critical time to get support and advice for anything that comes up during this time.

Days 31-60: Get On-The-Ground Training

The first 30 days are critical to getting a solid foundation and understanding of your company. While you may still be speaking with customers depending on the company, most of your energy will be spent getting a general understanding of the company, your team, and customers. The next phase of your training plan, then, is making this theoretical knowledge practical.

The 60-day portion of your plan will likely concentrate on getting practical, on-the-ground training to put the knowledge you gained in the first 30 days to use:

• Set and revise your sales goals . You can decide what works well and resonates with customers, and what does not.
• Get to know your prospects and how you can improve the customer experience. Your hands-on experience should also give you a better understanding of your market and where you can support your customers.
• Find a mentor or more experienced team member during this time. You can shadow them to see how they best manage their territories and make sales. You can also role-play with them to sharpen your skills.

Days 61-90: Refining Your Goals and Plans

Now that you have received critical training and an in-depth understanding of your company, team, and customers, the last part of your sales plan should put that all together. It is a chance to put everything you learned together to make the most impact.

The last part of your plan should include these elements:

• Adjust your goals in light of everything you have learned.
• Optimize your list of prospects and customers to ensure you are reaching the maximum number of people possible.
• Think through your schedule . Are there certain days or times that are better for prospecting? Can you batch your schedule or schedule routes to make the most use of your time? Make the most of your time to set yourself up for success.
• Get feedback from team members and leadership. Their experience can help guide you to be as effective as possible and line up your goals with your organization. Actively seek feedback and use it to shape your strategy and goals.

The final step in a general, interview-ready sales plan is refining and perfecting your sales strategy. Now is the time to learn, adjust, and optimize your sales approach.

Although a territory change does not require as much adjustment as starting at a new company from scratch, it does come with unique challenges. A solid sales plan will help ensure that you continue to meet and exceed your sales goals no matter where you are.

Here is a sample template for a territory change:

Days 1-30: Understand and Analyze Your Market with a Strategic Sales Plan

When you are just handed a brand-new territory, it pays off to do your research and understand the direction you need to go in before diving into a set plan. Rather than sprinting off blindly into the distance, let’s take these next thirty days to get fully acquainted with the market and create a strategic sales territory plan .

Sales territory plans help you orient yourself and lay out a clear, intentional approach to your sales. This is essential because when you are intentional, you’re better able to measure your results and optimize down the road.

This may seem a bit simple, but it’s imperative— don’t skip it! Before you can do anything, you need to define your market and environment quantitatively . Get started by asking specific questions with objective answers:

• What are the literal geographical bounds of this territory?
• How big is the Serviceable Addressable Market (or SAM ) in this territory? Or what is the value of this specific territory? You can look at profitability, potential deal values, total number of prospects, or leads—whatever is the most relevant KPI for your goals.
• How big is your Share of the Market (SOM)? Or, how much of the SAM can your company reasonably serve? Think about your available resources.

• What are the demographics of this territory? Are the companies large or small? What industry are they in? How educated are they about your solution?
• What spending power do these prospects have?
• What competitors are already here?

The more interview questions you ask, the better prepared you will be down the road—so don’t be afraid to dig in.

Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to make sense of it. Analyze your leads and evaluate them based on overall quality .

Your business goals define “quality.” If your current goal is to maximize revenue, you should look at potential revenue as your main KPI . If your goal is to minimize churn, you should look at the likelihood that the prospects would stick around.

Finally, you can divide your market into segments that help you target them more efficiently and effectively . It’s important to remember that segments aren’t made arbitrarily. Instead, they are defined by four things:

• Substantiality : Are there enough leads to make this segment worthwhile?
• Measurability : Can you easily identify who belongs in this segment?
• Accessibility : Does this segment represent actual prospects in your territory?
• Responsiveness : Does this segment require different sales or marketing tactics than other segments?

Typically, segments that meet these four criteria will be related to a relevant to your target KPI (noticing a theme here?). Some salespeople choose to create three segments based on the amount of “touch” (or work) involved in converting them: low touch, medium touch, and high touch. The choice is yours!

Complete a SWOT Analysis

Now that you know the basics about your territory, it’s time to evaluate your team’s relationship to it with a SWOT analysis.

“SWOT” is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Like most great tools, it seems simple at first, but you’ll find it to be invaluable as we build up our strategic sales plan.

“Strengths” and “Weaknesses” both look at the internal advantages and disadvantages your team has in this particular territory. They are directly related to your team—for example, the number of resources at your disposal.

“Opportunities” and “Threats” are external advantages and disadvantages. This has to do with the territory itself and the environment. For example, you may include competitors with a strong foothold as a threat or an underserved market as an opportunity.

Complete your own SWOT analysis by dividing a piece of paper into four columns and giving yourself some time to brainstorm. Take this exercise seriously—it’s going to come in handy soon when we start planning action steps.

Define Success

By now, the answer may be obvious, but it’s still essential to write it out explicitly and concisely: what exactly would success look like in this territory? What is your most important KPI ? Based on your research, what is a reasonable but challenging expectation for you to achieve?

This is when you want to set tangible goals for yourself—a process called sales accountability , which has been shown to drive productivity, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Sales accountability is all about setting specific sales quotas and goals and holding yourself accountable for hitting them.

When deciding what your goals should be, choose something that’s SMART—you know, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely . (We’re really all about the acronyms here at MMC.)

Create Action Items

Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: action items. This is the final step of creating your strategic sales territory plan. Now, you’re going to write out the blueprint that will be your guide for the following thirty days.

To find specific actions you should take to reach your SMART goals , return to your SWOT analysis, ask yourself how to take advantage of your Strengths and Opportunities, and neutralize your Weaknesses and Threats. For example:

• Is there an untapped market you can reach? How will you reach it?
• Who is your biggest competitor here? Why is your company the better choice? How will you convey this to your prospects?
• How can you let each of the team members at your disposal shine? How can you utilize their skills?

Write it out. This is going to be your guide for the next 30 days when you execute and evaluate.

Days 31-60: Execute Your Plan and Get Qualitative Feedback

For days 31 through 60, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal, for the rubber to hit the road, to make like Nike and “just do it.” It’s time to put your strategic sales territory plan into action.

For these thirty days, you’re going to have a fuller calendar than you could imagine. Your goal is to keep your head up and keep moving forward. Think of it like a writer’s first draft—you need to get something on the page to improve upon it later.

In addition to hitting your action items, here are some critical tasks for you to complete during this time.

Find New Leads

There are always more leads out there, and the more acquainted you get with your territory, the better you’ll know how (and where) to look for new customers.

The best way to find new leads is to excel at serving the customers you currently have . When you leave a path of satisfied customers in your wake, you increase your referral rate and generate free positive “press” (people talk!). Even better, these leads are warm, which means less work for a higher close rate.

Optimize Your Route

Now that you know where you need to go, you can start optimizing your route . Use a digital tool like Map My Customers to discover how to get from Customer A to Customer B and then to Customer C more efficiently —and, better yet, what order to visit them in.

See a hands-on product tour of Map My Customers

Depending on your priorities, you can choose to optimize for time spent driving, distance covered, or a specific order in which you need to meet with clients. You can save up to 30% on gas just by making this simple change!

Get Qualitative Feedback

At this point in the game, it’s too early to have a significant amount of meaningful numerical data. Instead, it’s the perfect time to lean into qualitative feedback from your own team, your customers, and your prospects.

Be sure to regularly check in with your team to see how they think things are going and if they have any ideas. A good way to do this is to schedule a time in advance for a quick touch-base with each person. Try to come to that meeting ready to listen.

You can also meet with a mentor figure at your company . This person may be in another team or higher up. The point is that they have the experience, and you value their opinion. Ask to grab coffee with them and show them what you’re up to. See if they have any useful pointers.

And, of course, you can always get feedback from your customers—and even the deals that don’t go through (which, as sad as it is, is typically the most helpful of all).

Lastly, use surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to gather as much information as possible from your customers about why they did or didn’t buy, what other solutions they considered, what they think of your business so far, etc. As they say, the customer is always right—so figure out what they think!

90: Optimize and Implement New Strategies by Using Sales Analytics

You’re nearly there—it’s the home stretch! These final thirty days are all about taking what you did up to now and doing it better . Fortunately, you should finally have some of your very own data to work with, which will give you an enormous advantage.

Run the Numbers

Now that you’ve had time for data to accumulate, we can finally get to analyzing. This is the back end of that “sales accountability” we talked about before—it’s time to see if you hit your goals.

By referencing your CRM , lay out your data in a way that helps you to make sense of it all (we love graphs). Be sure to look not just as your main KPI but at all relevant data points. Review the results with your entire team to see where you did well, where you can improve, and what was successful .

Look at the numbers and the qualitative feedback you collected side-by-side. What’s the story here? It can be useful at this point to also evaluate how specific action steps you took played out. Did they help you to address the Weakness or Threats that you identified? Or do you need a new plan?

Then, take the numbers even further. Go beyond what’s currently happening with your customers and discern what is likely to happen down the road with predictive analytics and sales forecasting .

For example, if you notice a customer has been calling into customer support more than usual—a red flag that they may churn soon—you can reach out to them with a special or thoughtful offer to keep them on board.

Individual Account Reviews

Often, figuring out the best way to serve a current customer is as simple as just asking. Maintaining a positive relationship with your customers is all about staying one step ahead and showing them that you’re thinking of them. Accomplish this by scheduling individual account reviews for each of your clients .

In these meetings, you can ask critical questions to help you better serve your client. For example:

• How has our service been?
• Have we been able to help you improve your KPI?
• How could we serve you better?
• What else are you working towards or struggling with?

This is an opportunity to gather invaluable qualitative feedback and upsell or cross-sell existing customers. Whatever you do, be sure to be empathetic —only sell what you genuinely think will be good for them

Automate Your Sales Processes

It’s hard to automate systems before you’ve worked out the kinks, but by now, you should be prepared to switch some tasks over to some handy-dandy robots (or software, but same thing).

To find the best ways to automate your processes, first, take a day or two to organize your CRM .

When you adjust to a new territory, it’s normal to be overwhelmed and make silly mistakes with your CRM. Go back through and make sure that you’ve logged all the relevant information completely and correctly.

Then, you can take a look at some of the easiest ways to automate (and the best tools out there ). That way, you can focus less on menial tasks and more on selling.

A 30-60-90 day plan is not just for sales reps. It’s a critical tool for leadership to make concrete plans to meet their goals as well. With different roles and goals, though, the 30-60-90 day plan will look far different than a general sales plan:

Day 1-30: Get to Know Your Team

The first month of any job requires getting to know the company. You should be taking this time to learn about policies, goals, and how the company works. For leadership, in particular, this includes getting to know your team and how it currently operates.

The first month should dive deep into learning about your company in general. You should be learning about your product or service, the target market, metrics, and trends. Your team will rely on your expertise, so an in-depth understanding will be vital to your position.

Beyond the technical expertise, use this time to have conversations with your direct reports and get to know them. They can provide valuable insights to help direct your goals and understand each team member’s strengths and weaknesses.

No two teams are exactly alike. Each person brings something different to the team, and each team has different strengths and weaknesses. It’s impossible to be an effective leader and keep your team happy and motivated if you don’t take the time to understand their unique dynamics. A deep team understanding is critical to good leadership.

Days 31-60: Bringing Your Skills to the Team

While the first 30 days are about getting a more in-depth understanding of your company and team, the next 30 days are your chance to start making tangible and useful changes. You are hired for your unique skill set, so now is the time to impart that onto your team.

Take this time to identify any skills gap on your team. For example, does your team lack a tech expert to help other members navigate their sales technology? See where you can offer your expertise and where training might be necessary.

Based on what you have observed in your team and your understanding of your company, now is also a time to create goals for your team. Being able to impart a vision to your team is valuable for maintaining morale and guiding their decisions. With measurable goals, you can help shape how the team operates to meet the overall company goals.

Days 61-90: Develop and Draft a Training Strategy

Having identified your team’s gaps and goals, your final 30 days might be developing a training strategy to overcome any skills gaps and guide your direct reports into their roles in the future. It is where you take practical steps to address what you have learned and identified in the first 60 days.

While you may not be promoting people quite yet, your time so far should give you a sense of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Your final process should be coming up with the best plan to coach them to where they can be and want to be in the future.

Day 91: What Now?

Congratulations! You’ve officially gone from getting a new sales job or territory to crushing it in just 90 days. How does it feel?

Remember that “crushing it” is all about constant improvement. If you’re trying new things, looking for new opportunities, seeking out new leads, and generally playing an active role in your position, you’ll always be crushing it—even if one specific campaign isn’t a resounding success.

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How to create an effective sales territory plan in 6 steps

Some experts say that the secret to sales success is a combination of skill, perseverance, and a good sales conversation starter . And they’re right—those are all important attributes for salespeople. But it overlooks what is possibly the most important factor in sales success—which happens before a meeting is even booked: your sales territory plan. 

If you’re running a small business , you may wonder why you need a sales territory plan. After all, it sounds complicated—something for bigger, more sophisticated organizations.

But think of that plan as the important strategic groundwork that’s going to help you reach your sales goals. The good news is that yours doesn’t need to be complicated. And we’re here to help you create one, headache-free, for your small business or team.  

Let’s break it down. In this post we’ll cover: 

• What a sales territory plan is
• 4 reasons why you need one

How to create a sales territory plan in 6 steps

• Essential tools for creating the plan

Up your sales game and close more deals with these free cold outreach scripts. ☎️

What is a sales territory plan?

Basically, it’s your strategy for how your team will target and approach prospects, leads, and existing customers to close more deals. Before you jump into your fancy sales territory mapping software , you need a battle plan:

An example of a sales territory plan from Adaptive Insights that shows things like which sales reps (and how many reps) you need, how many accounts you want to win per year, and more.

Traditionally—and as its name tells you—the sales territory plan was defined by geography. Salespeople would focus on prospects within a specific area only. 

Today’s level of connectivity has changed that. You can now optimize your sales territory plan and target your leads by industry, business size, deal potential, and role too. Which, as you might guess, is much more effective than using geography alone. 

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4 reasons why even small businesses need a sales territory plan

You’d never walk into a sales meeting with a prospect without having done a decent amount of prep work. Creating a sales territory plan should be no different. Here’s why. 

1. It helps you target specific industries, regions, opportunities, and customers

Instead of targeting customers geographically, you can now segment opportunities by industry, opportunity, role, business size, business type, and others. This allows you to focus on meeting specific customer needs and target prospects that are most likely to buy, rather than simply playing a numbers game by trying to cover the most ground. 

2. It aligns your sales team with your prospects

Every salesperson on your team will have a different set of strengths based on their experience—and effective teamwork is the key to making this work. For example, some reps may have lots of experience selling to a specific demographic, whereas others are experts in certain industries or types of products. Being able to align their efforts with a customer’s industry or specific needs means they’re going to close more deals than taking the spray-and-pray approach.

3. It empowers you to set realistic goals, track progress, and optimize your strategy

Having the latest Bluetooth headset and sales software is great and all, but setting goals are a must in sales. Having a way to track them helps you see what’s working, what isn’t, and why—and it’s essential to your success. With the ability to track your progress, you can replicate successes and easily make adjustments to areas that need work. 

4. It lets you spend more time selling

Having a plan in place and a path forward means you and your team can focus on actually selling to customers that are the most likely to buy. You know who your happy customers are, you understand their challenges, and you know how to help them reach their goals. And that means more deals closed. 

Having a plan in place can help reps focus on their role, save time, and close more deals.

Now that you know what a sales territory plan is, let’s dive into how to write one in five basic steps. 

1. Define your larger sales goals

Before you have a plan, you need a goal (or goals). And there are many different approaches you can take to determine sales goals. But we want to keep it simple, realistic, and easy to do without needing a 10,000-cell spreadsheet. Start with the big sales numbers and then work your way downwards. First, determine what your annual goal is, then break that into quarters, months, and even weeks. 

For example, if your annual sales goal is $500K, then your quarterly goals will be $125K, and your monthly targets will be $41.7K.

If you’re not sure what your annual goal should be, last year’s sales numbers plus ten percent is a good place to start. (Of course, if things are going really well and you want to be more ambitious, you can adjust this number—and vice versa.)

Keep in mind that these numbers are just preliminary. You can adjust them later when you’ve completed the other steps and accounted for outside factors like economic conditions, seasonality, existing pipeline, and even current customers.

2. Define your market 

What does your piece of the pie look like? Your market encompasses everyone you sell to. 

Make a list of all the different people or industries you target. For business-to-business sales, this could be business type and size, departmental function, or roles within the organization. For business-to-consumer sales, you can segment based on demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic information. 

Ultimately, you’ll need to determine how to segment your customers based on the what’s relevant to your business or product. 

An example of how to segment B2C customers

Defining your market lets you paint a clear picture of who your customers are. It allows your sales team to play to their strengths and address specific needs, goals, and pain points, which will differ between these different segments. 

3. Assess prospect and account quality

Some customers will see tons of value in your product. The benefits are clear and it solves a big headache for them. They’re happy to buy a lot of what you’re selling, and often.

But, others may not have the same need. 

Review which customers have traditionally been easy to sell to and/or seen high levels of success with your product. Then prioritize those leads and similar accounts. 

4. Start mapping out the strengths and weaknesses of your reps

Some reps have a great understanding of the ins and outs of how enterprise organizations buy products and take on new vendors. Others will specialize in selling to people within a specific role, regardless of the size of the business. List all of the strengths and weaknesses of each sales rep so you have a better idea of the type of prospects they should target.

Keep in mind that it’s not about ranking them from best to worst—many sales reps who start out weak can finish strong with coaching and experience. It’s about aligning their skills and experience to where they’ll make the biggest impact and achieve the most success.  

5. Assign leads

Armed with the knowledge of where your reps shine, you can now start assigning accounts. Start with the most obvious, high-value pairings where the rep has a lot of experience selling to that industry or type of individual. For example, reps who are good at closing large deals with educational institutions would be assigned leads in the educational space. 

Next, assign leads to target roles. Reps who have experience working with or selling to IT managers would be assigned leads with similar titles. 

Apply the same process to company size, deal size, location, and any other way you segmented your market. 

How you organize this information is up to you. Some people use spreadsheets. Some use text documents. Others use illustrations and graphs. A mix of charts, maps, and tables will give you a pretty comprehensive and easy-to-absorb view of your territory plan:

6. Look for ways to improve your plan

Congrats—your sales territory plan is just about done. Your goals are more than just numbers on a page. And you can see a path to how you’re going to achieve them. But you may notice that it’s a bit lopsided. Perhaps some of your reps are carrying too much of the workload or the quotas don’t seem realistic. 

The truth is, you may go through several iterations of your plan. You’ll have to move leads around to different reps. For example, giving your stronger reps leads that will be harder to close, and newer reps lower value deals where there’s less at stake. Ultimately, the numbers should be achievable for every rep. So take a step back and look at your plan objectively to make sure it makes sense.

And you’ll need to make sure you have the tools you’ll need to execute your plan. For example, do you have a business phone service, call center management system , or IVR system?

Essential tools for building your sales territory plan

With your plan in hand and a clear path to success, you’re going to need a few tools to put things into action.  

Office software

Whether you’re a visual person who prefers to map out your territory plan using images and graphs or you’re the type that likes to dive into every row and column of a spreadsheet, you’re going to need office software to turn your plan into a document. Office software usually includes apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation decks, and email. The two most popular options available right now are probably Microsoft 365  and Google Workspace .

What’s the difference? Without diving into a feature-by-feature comparison , Google Workspace is often better for small- and medium-sized businesses who are looking for a simple, elegant solution. Microsoft 365 has more robust, enterprise-grade features that can be used for more complex businesses. 

An all-in-one communications tool designed for sales teams

This may seem like a no-brainer—if you’re selling, of course you need to have a phone, email address. Perhaps you need a business phone number , a toll free number , conference call services , and contact center software , along with SMS and fax (if you’re selling in industries like insurance). 

But if your reps spend any time traveling to meetings and working on the go, a traditional office phone setup isn’t going to support them very well. You’ll also be missing out on a few key features that are made specifically for helping sales teams. 

Ideally, you should have a sales app that lets you make voice calls and video calls (especially useful if you do a lot of sales demos ), send instant messages to your team, and basically communicate through any channel you need. Here are a few features to look for: 

Cloud support : Having a phone system or communications app that works on the cloud is much better than just using a cell phone. Why? Because your reps can receive inbound calls and make calls from their laptops or their own personal phones (without using their personal numbers)—without needing additional hardware. Plus, that same app lets you have video calls and send instant messages to your team:

Call monitoring : Ramping up new sales reps can take time and a lot of coaching. What if you could monitor your team’s sales calls quietly and listen in to what they’re saying to prospects? This way, you can help get them up to speed and get them booking meetings, pitching better, and closing deals faster. 

Call recording : Every now and then, you’ll want to make an example of your agents (in the best way possible, of course). Call recording lets you capture their best calls and share them with the team, making it easier to replicate success. It’s also a good way to find opportunities for coaching. Sometimes, you’re also just required by law to keep records of calls with customers, so this feature might even be a must-have. 

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform 

Your team will be making calls, booking meetings, and taking notes all day long. A CRM makes it a whole lot easier to remember and track all the key details about their calls and prospects, so they can close more deals. 

To make things even easier, many CRMs integrate with communications tools to keep your calls and key customer details in one, well-organized place. 

Ready to start building a sales territory plan?

Making a sales territory plan may seem complicated. And in some cases, it is—whether you’re a large business with territories all over the world or a smaller business that’s just started branching out into new regions. 

The key is to not overthink things. Follow these steps, and you’ll be able to identify your goals, better understand your market, know your customers—and target them without breaking (too much of) a sweat.

Originally published Mar 01, 2020, updated Aug 15, 2024

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Sales territory planning: The five minute territory plan and template

What is a sales territory plan?

The number one issue for sales leaders today is – pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. How’s your pipeline looking? What’s your pipeline coverage gap look like? Well, we got you covered.

We have proven ways to quickly build self-sourced pipeline and progress pipeline faster too. It all starts with planning – territory planning. Sales territory planning is a proven way to empower sales teams to prioritize accounts and activities to generate more pipeline and close more deals – faster.

A sales territory plan is a strategic document that outlines how a sales team will approach and manage sales activities within a specific geographic area or market segment. The primary goal of a sales territory plan is to optimize the allocation of resources, increase sales effectiveness, and achieve revenue targets within the assigned territory. A territory plan serves as a roadmap for a salesperson and sales team, guiding their efforts and helping them stay focused on achieving success within their assigned territory.

Territory planning offers several benefits to organizations, sales teams and salespeople. Here are some of the advantages.

• Clear sales objectives
• I ncrease sales and revenue
• Increase sales efficiency
• Develop more self-sourced pipeline
• Optimize resource allocation
• Improved focus and activity prioritization
• Better customer relationships
• Deeper understanding of customer and market needs
• Improved customer retention and growth
• Enhanced team collaboration

The five minute sales territory plan

We believe there’s nothing better than old school, back to basics, sales territory analysis, planning and prospecting. Here’s a short talk outlining how to get your team embracing territory planning as a path to create self-sourced demand. Imagine what would happen to your business and pipeline if every seller documented their own territory plan and then video recorded a short and thoughtful five minute version of it?

We call this the “Five Minute Territory Plan.”

Reps love the 5 minute territory plan:

“I found recording my sales territory plans to be such an illuminating experience. It helped me identify gaps in my strategy, evaluate what I was saying and why I was saying it. The AI was real time and the feedback was spot on. I feel I’m better for it and looking forward to doing more”. – Ben

Turn territory planning into an i nteractive experience for your sales teams by making everyone part of the process and accountable for results. I believe our quota carrying, revenue generating sales executives need to own self-sourcing pipeline. Territory planning is the way to reinvigorate it. Here are the secrets to making “territory planning and prospecting” a revenue generating peer activity appreciated versus criticized.

• Have vision and leadership to make it part of your sales culture
• Make territory plans relevant, short, and accessible to share best practices
• Do sales territory planning quarterly or even monthly

Vision and leadership make it happen

Companies that embrace the idea of video recording territory planning with Sales Enablement Platform on a regular basis, with peer reviews, are seeing tremendous increases in self-sourced pipeline and improvements in new hire time to ramp. Think about it. Imagine if every new hire had access to stack-ranked video recordings of territory plans grouped by tenure. What would happen to your team’s time to first deal and time to ramp metrics? The power and value of crowdsourcing is incredible. We all know that some of us are great at planning and others aren’t so great. Making territory planning a team sport is a chance to get everyone to learn how to plan like those who do it best. It takes vision to turn crowdsourcing territory plans into culture. It takes work to align teams on expectations. It takes discipline to make it stick.

Make the plan relevant, short, and accessible

Here are the basics of a sales territory plan proven to create pipeline and generate revenue fast. Start by sharing a territory planning template that’s relevant and short. Click here to download our template. Turn the territory plan into a collaborative business review.

Have your team document the facts of the territory and goals.

Then, move into top prioritizing accounts to prospect. Prioritize top accounts and explain why they are chosen (relationships, industry fit, target profile). For each, in one sentence, be clear and focused on the outreach strategy.

If some of the accounts are ready, have your teams create an opportunity plan and make sure opportunity plans are thorough. It doesn’t take much to know if there is a plan in place.

• What’s the compelling event?
• What’s the strategy to engage with a champion and economic buyer?
• What’s the mutual success plan?

We’re not doing deep detailed reviews. You can also follow a MEDDICC/MEDDPICC deal review format too.

Close out the plan with strategies to build pipeline. Don’t forget that we’re living in a 3X or even 5X pipeline-ratio world. Putting “pen to paper” on these territory statistics makes it super clear what needs to get done, to earn a spot on the beach celebrating club.

That’s the flow of the five slide and “Five Minute Territory Plan” template. Download the template now .

The benefits AI and sales territory plans

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can significantly enhance the effectiveness of sales territory planning by providing advanced analytics, automation, insights and coaching. Here are several ways in which AI can assist in sales territory planning:

Data Analysis and Insights: AI can analyze vast amounts of data, including customer demographics, purchasing behavior, and market trends, to provide valuable insights into each territory’s potential.

Customer Segmentation: AI algorithms can perform advanced customer segmentation based on various factors, enabling sales teams to target specific customer groups with tailored approaches.

Automation of Routine Tasks: AI can automate routine and repetitive tasks, such as data entry, report generation, and administrative activities. This allows sales teams to focus more on strategic planning and customer engagement. SalesHood’s AI Call Recaps and AI Coach are great examples.

Content recommendations: AI-driven personalization can enhance sales effectiveness within each territory by tailoring campaigns to the specific preferences and needs of local customers.Recommendation engines can suggest personalized offers and content, increasing the relevance of marketing materials.

Coaching: AI-powered collaboration platforms facilitate communication and knowledge-sharing among sales team members working in different territories.

A great use of AI is to provide coaching feedback to salespeople in real-time on their sales territory plans. The power of AI with territory planning is that you will make your review process more effective and efficient. It’s a game-changer for sales leaders, sales managers and sellers. Here are the benefits of using AI to inspect, review and coach territory plans:

• Reps and team show up ready for team reviews
• 10X review volume and quality
• Coaching in the moment

Here’s a video explaining the benefits of using AI to coach sellers and provide feedback – especially relevant for account and territory reviews.

Overcome territory planning objections and barriers

For many, sales territory planning is not perceived as a revenue generating and pipeline building activity. It’s our job as managers and coaches to guide our teams to breakthrough these barriers. Here are some questions to pose during a team meeting, kickoff event or one-on-one.

• What limiting beliefs are holding us back?
• What do we have to do to achieve greatness?
• How do we need to grow personally and professionally?
• How should we think differently?
• What behaviors need to develop, change, and evolve?

Sales territory planning cadence

Given the sales territory plan template is short, forward thinking leaders are building monthly and quarterly territory planning cadence. The short plans get sellers to focus on strategy and execution versus too much time filling out slides that aren’t relevant. We want to see more sellers take the time to be thoughtful about their plan and business. What we love most about this process is getting everyone to limit their territory planning to five minutes. Less is more. Less slides and less words is hard to accomplish.. We’ve learned when territory planning video recordings are five minutes or less (and accessible), sellers will invest the time to watch up to fifteen peer territory plans. We have also witnessed that with AI sellers are taking time to get feedback multiple times on their plans before submitting for approval by their managers.

The process and benefits apply to account planning too. If you want to learn more about Account Planning, here’s another blog you can read . You can scale Territory Planning and Account Planning with our AI Coach .

We have proven ways to quickly build self-sourced pipeline and progress pipeline faster too. Sharing hyper-personalized sites to educate and elevate prospecting outreach is working wonders for many of our customers.

✅ 60% pipeline conversion ✅ Win-rates are up 2X ✅ Deal velocity up 15% ✅ Deal size up 400%

Who doesn’t want these results? Click here to learn more and start a free trial.

How does SalesHood help with territory planning?

SalesHood is an AI-powered revenue execution platform designed to support various aspects of sales effectiveness, including training, coaching, and collaboration. SalesHood plays a role in facilitating certain aspects of the sales territory planning process including planning, prospecting and personalization. Here’s how SalesHood can contribute:

Training and onboarding: SalesHood provides a platform for creating and delivering training content. For sales teams involved in territory planning, this can be valuable for onboarding new team members or ensuring that existing team members are up-to-date on the latest strategies and approaches related to territory management.

Content creation and best practice sharing: SalesHood allows organizations to create and share content related to sales strategies, market insights, and best practices. This can be useful in the context of territory planning by providing a centralized repository for information that can be accessed by sales teams as they plan and execute strategies within their assigned territories.

Collaboration and communication: The collaboration features of SalesHood facilitate communication and knowledge-sharing among sales team members. This can be beneficial for coordinating activities within and across territories, allowing teams to share insights, success stories, and challenges.

Coaching and feedback: SalesHood supports coaching and feedback mechanisms, enabling managers and peers to provide guidance to sales representatives. This can be particularly useful in the context of territory planning, where feedback can help refine strategies and improve performance.

Hyper-personalized prospecting with Client Sites: Guide sellers what to do, what to share and what to say with hyper-personalized prospecting. There’s so much noise out there. Rise above the crowd with a differentiated and personalized approach to prospecting. We have proven ways to quickly build self-sourced pipeline and progress pipeline faster too. Sharing hyper-personalized sites to educate and elevate prospecting outreach is working wonders for many of our customers. Salesforce says that only 29% of sellers use videos to prospect. SalesLoft reports that using video to prospect can lead to a 26% higher response rate compared to simple email text.

SalesHood complements the sales territory planning process by providing a platform for ongoing learning, collaboration, and prospecting. Integrating SalesHood with other tools and processes tailored to territory planning can create a more comprehensive and effective approach to sales management and pipeline development.

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How to Create a Sales Territory Plan: The Ultimate Guide

What is sales territory planning.

Sales territory planning is a critical element of sales management and overall sales success. It involves creating defined and balanced sales territories, customizing sales activities to maximize sales potential within each territory, and managing sales performance on an ongoing basis. Sales territories are typically determined by factors such as geography, industry, company size, or other metrics that matter to your business (e.g., historical performance, ARR potential, etc). By providing  balanced sales territories , companies can create specific revenue targets and strategies to increase sales productivity and efficiency in each region with precision.  Good territory planning ensures that all sellers have an equal opportunity to hit their number, which keeps them motivated and on target.

Benefits of Sales Territory Planning

Creating balanced territories can have a huge impact on your team’s ability to achieve its sales goals, yet it is often overlooked. According to the  Harvard Business Review , optimizing territory design can increase sales by 2 to 7%, without any change in total resources or sales strategy. In short, well-designed territories ensure that the right resources are focused on the right opportunities. This improves quota attainment and rep retention, making it a key driver of sales productivity and performance.  Good territory design is especially important In difficult economic times. Rather than increasing sales headcount, well-balanced territories can enable companies to achieve more with the same or fewer resources.

How to Create a Sales Territory Plan

The most important first step for  sales territory planning  is to determine your corporate goals so you can define your ideal customer. For example, one company’s goal may be to increase market share while another’s may be to retain customers. The BCG matrix (figure 1) provides a useful framework for understanding your accounts and dividing opportunities fairly among your team. BCG describes four types of accounts to consider:

• Cash Cows (high market share, but low growth) – opportunities may be limited
• Dogs (low market share and low growth) – it will be very tough going
• Question Marks (low market share and high growth) – these opportunities need serious thought whether they are worth the investment but could have high payoff
• Stars (high market share and high growth) – fantastic opportunities.

The key is to define each category based on your company’s context and GTM strategy.  For example, a Cash Cow account may look very different from one company to the next, and may even vary by region or product.  A Cash Cow in North America may actually be a Question Mark in the Asia Pacific region where the company has no existing market share.

Some important questions to ask before you dive into territory planning include:

• Are you trying to expand into a new market?
• Has your product or SKU mix changed to suit customers in a new industry?
• Has your total addressable market (TAM) changed or been updated based on new data?
• Are you targeting a certain company size this year?
• How important is expansion revenue to your growth strategy and which roles does this impact?

Common Sales Territory Planning Criteria

The next step is to divide accounts into each of the four categories among various roles on your team. There is no one size fits all approach and most organizations will follow a hybrid model. You may decide to simply divide the categories evenly across your team. Or you may target one segment of the matrix, such as Cash Cow accounts, with a new product and assign reps and overlay resources accordingly.

Although every organization will prioritize differently, some common criteria that are used to plan territories include:

Geography  – Historically, geography has been one of the most simple and common ways to plan territories and can work well if your sales model requires feet on the street. However, as remote selling becomes commonplace,  many companies are moving away from geographic territories  because there are better ways to maximize opportunity that more closely align with the corporate strategy.

Historical performance  – Which accounts, products, or geographies have historically performed well?  For example, you may balance your high-performing Star accounts or products with a mix of net-new Question Mark accounts or products.

Revenue potential  – A common approach, many companies balance territories based on the TAM or revenue potential of accounts.

Size  – High ACV accounts may have long sales cycles that require a high- touch or in-person sales process, favoring geographic territories, versus low ACV accounts with short sales cycles that favor other criteria.

Industry  – Industry can be useful for balancing especially if you are building a new vertical or have industry-specific products and messaging, such as financial services or government accounts.

Product Type  – If you have specialized teams selling certain products, it may be important to balance overlay resources across accounts.

Propensity to Buy  – Many companies group their accounts into categories based on propensity to buy and balance these across their resources (e.g., evenly divide Tier 1, 2 or 3 accounts across their team)

Account Score  – An  account score  aggregates many of the above criteria into one simple number which makes it easy to balance.

Quota  – Because it is almost impossible to get to 100% balance, you may consider factoring in quota to make things fair.  For example, you may assign a New York City rep a higher quota than a Midwestern rep; or a rep taking on a new, untested market a lower quota than a rep in an established territory.  As long as these calculations are transparent, this can be a useful final arbiter to equalize your territories.

Sales Territory Planning Examples

Most companies start their territory carving process by dividing into the major world regions. This first cut serves to align resources with time zone, culture/language, and internal organizational structures. From there, Ops and Strategy teams use a combination of criteria to balance territories to align with their corporate strategy. The following example demonstrates how single segments can be balanced. For additional examples, please visit,  The Ultimate Guide to Territory Balancing .

The Company:

• $50 million in annual revenue, reps have annual sales quotas of $1M each
• 50 Global Sales Territories

The GTM Resources

• EMEA – 10 reps
• LATAM – 2 reps
• APAC – 2 reps
• AMER – 36 reps

Planning Scenario:

The SMB sales in AMER tend to be high velocity. The team of 5 SMB reps need to move through accounts quickly to either disqualify or pursue. Rather than using a region-based design, the SMB territories are constructed according to the following criteria:

• Historical data indicates that financial firms are typically high-value and quick deals, so all accounts in the finance industry are distributed evenly across the territories.
• Additionally, ICP accounts located in dense urban locations, such as Manhattan and San Francisco, are distributed evenly across the territories.
• Each Territory has a maximum of 250 accounts at a given time. Reps can disqualify accounts throughout the quarter, then at the start of each quarter, the territories are topped up with fresh accounts.

Challenges of Sales Territory Planning

Even the best laid territory plans often go awry.  Here are some of the common challenges faced in sales territory planning.

Seller turnover

What happens when your best sales rep leaves in the middle of a quarter? Do you reassign that patch permanently, or temporarily while you backfill the role? What happens when hiring takes longer than anticipated? Are you certain that new reps will ramp quickly?  These are all examples of everyday occurrences that can throw the best laid plans into chaos.

Markets are constantly changing

Change is a constant when it comes to territory planning.  New competition enters your market, companies are acquired, recessions occur, pandemics hit.  These unanticipated changes can have a dramatic and sudden impact on your go-to-market (GTM) plans.  When a company sets an annual ‘one and done’ territory plan it is extremely difficult to respond with agility.

Spreadsheets and manual processes hinder agility

When your team has fewer than 50 reps, it is possible to manage territories with a manual spreadsheet-driven process  However, as you grow, it can be impossible to scale relying on spreadsheets alone. This method is fraught with errors, version control, and collaboration issues.  Other organizations may rely on  corporate planning software , yet these tools lack out-of-the-box functionality like integrated planning and agile deployment, so still end up bogged down in custom coding projects.

Data quality issues

Garbage in means garbage out.  The data in your CRM is constantly changing and if you rely on it to plan, you may end up with a point-in-time plan that does not reflect the current reality.  For example, if you pull data about your accounts from your CRM in September for a plan that launches in December, the data may already be several months out of date by the time you are ready to go to market.

Too many tools

Some organizations use  multiple point tools  for territory planning that quickly become difficult to manage. Your territory assignments are integrally tied to other aspects of your GTM plan like capacity, quotas, and routing.  When a change to territories occurs, it can be nearly impossible to make changes in real-time and keep your entire GTM system in sync.

Benefits of Sales Territory Planning Software

To overcome these challenges and maximize sales territory planning efficiency, many organizations are turning to Territory Planning or  Territory Management software . This enables them to shift from static sales territory planning to  dynamic territory management  process. Territory management recognizes that change never ends, and organizations must reduce the cycle time to respond to change. Automation enables RevOps teams to quickly adapt to change with agility so that revenue teams execute with clarity and efficiency. With Territory Management software, data can be refreshed and re-factored into the plan at any point during the year, which reduces the annual territory planning burden. Those that adopt a “ continuous GTM planning ” approach will be the ones that win the next business cycle.

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• Territory management

Sales Territory Planning: Strategies, Tips, and Best Practices

Sales territory planning is a tedious and time-consuming process without mapping software. However, a strong sales territory plan is crucial, as it’s an important part of any successful sales strategy.

Read on to learn what a sales territory is, real-world examples of sales territory plans, and how to create a successful sales territory plan (template included!). We have broken the process into 4 main stages:

Step 1: Analyze your market

Step 2: segment your customers, step 3: conduct a swot analysis, step 4: create your sales territory plan, sales territory planning: the basics.

• Knowing how to create a territory sales plan helps you make better-informed hiring decisions, which drives sales productivity, revenue, and profits.
• Sales territory planning maximizes sales resources, producing equitable and balanced areas and optimizes lead allocation.
• A sales territory plan is a win for salespeople, sales managers, and operations.

Let's start with some basics:

What is a sales territory?

There are three approaches to designing sales territories.

Here you assign a group of customers in a geographic region to a sales rep. Zipcodes are the most popular building blocks, but you can use county or state boundaries too.

Account-based territories

Many organizations ignore geographic boundaries and use an account-based or points-based design. Regardless of location, assigning accounts to a Senior sales rep or manager solidifies customer relationships.

As the name suggests, it combines geographic and points-based territory design.

Why good, clean data matters

To optimize sales territories, you need clean data. The challenge for many organizations is that their data lives in multiple systems like CRM, ERP, and spreadsheets.

• Consolidating the data makes your sales process more manageable, which is where mapping software excels.
• You win once you import clean data using one system as your source of truth.
• You can overlay multiple layers of data and fine-tune your analysis, and as you make changes, they sync with your CRM or other systems in real time, saving hours in administration.

Sales rep turnover

Your data is clean, so next, you turn to your greatest resource: your salespeople. You'll want to avoid underperformance due to poor sales territory design. All reps need coaching and development, but when your sales territory design is sub-optimal, your sales team’s efforts can fall behind, and training may not resolve the deficit.

Many salespeople leave because the odds are stacked against them.

Real World Scenario

A large contract recruitment company with a US-based field team experienced sales rep turnover of over 20% annually. On the surface, the under-performers left, which was a good thing. But the costs of hiring and training new reps escalated, and the sales operations team conducted a deep analysis of sales performance and territory design to understand if there was a correlation.

The results were stark. Almost 60% of their sales territories were out of balance with two key metrics.

• Sales potential

Territories balanced on potential sales

Territories balanced on customer count

Sales potential: The organization targeted large construction sites across the US to sell their services. When they mapped the locations of the highest-potential projects, a trend emerged. A minority of sales territories had enough potential projects to hit their quotas. So no matter how hard the rep worked, the area could never reach its sales quota.

The opposite was true also. Underperforming salespeople managed the sales territories with the lowest potential, so hitting quota was much more challenging.

Workload: Using workload as a balancing metric uncovered significant flaws in their territory designs. Too many territories had workloads far in excess or below their target workloads, meaning sales potential was wasted or unrealized.

Outcome: By redesigning the sales territories and optimizing sales potential and workload, sales reps had equal opportunities to succeed. Managers could now focus their coaching on skill development, knowing that territories did not reward the salesperson.

Check out our Conquering Sales Territory Management guide

How territory management software helps

Managing sales territories can quickly start to feel overwhelming. From careful planning to in-depth analysis to ever-evolving adaptation, it can be challenging to keep up with changing market conditions, customer needs, and company goals.

Whether you're expanding to a new sales territory or trying to boost your sales productivity, effective territory management software can make a big difference.

• You can identify inefficiencies and overlaps in territory design and fix them quickly. You can map your sales data and analyze trends instantly.
• You can overlay competitor locations and assess new opportunities.
• The options are endless as you strive to design the best territories.
• Ongoing sales territory management is easy and intuitive too. You can adjust alignments as new territory growth opportunities arise or people leave, and you re-assess area mergers. It is a way to future-proof revenue growth and maximize rep productivity.
• Optimizing your marketing plans is more manageable, too, as you map customers, prospects, and competitors and overlay other critical data. You see trends and gaps and hidden insights.

Critical outcomes of sales territory planning

Once you've chosen your territory mapping software and cleaned up your data, you'll be closer to hitting your sales goals.

But let's look at some key outcomes you should expect from properly aligned and optimized sales territories.

Your sales plan is data-led

Data-driven decisions are essential, and effective sales territory planning leverages the power of your data to give you visual insights.

You eliminate the guesswork, but just as important, it is easier to share, collaborate and engage others via live maps. That cuts down planning cycles while improving realignments.

Let’s look at some common sales territory plan examples and how they can be used to provide value to an entire organization. Imagine a sales operations team has visualized and analyzed the sales data using heatmaps, pin, and color-coded maps. Next, they optimized the territories using their territory mapping software with a workload and sales potential index.

The final (and some would say the most crucial step) involves their key stakeholders, sales managers, and HR. They bring their expertise and local knowledge and add suggested improvements using a shared map.

Their objective is to minimize disruption. Sometimes a customer relationship is more important than a perfect territory alignment, so it is easy to move an account to a rep (using an account exception approach).

HR, too will want to understand the impact those changes have on compensation.

Feedback via interactive maps accelerates decision-making and improves territory design while minimizing disruption.

Your sales performance improves

With a detailed sales territory planning system, you can track leads, opportunities, deals lost, deals won, and all critical metrics on a map and share insights.

This type of granular insight also supports targeted sales and marketing campaigns. It adds context to how regional markets have changed over time. Data from Gartner , the research firm, shows proactive territory management can increase revenue by improving sales planning and streamlining various management tasks. The Harvard Business Review says that impact can increase revenue by up to 7% without any other changes. Mapping software plays a significant part in the process.

Your sales costs decrease

Modern field sales teams understand that customer-facing time is precious and hard-won. Eliminating unnecessary travel (windshield time) is critical. Meeting customers face to face can be a competitive advantage, but cost control is essential too. Every 1% increase in selling time should convert to more revenue and higher productivity.

You slash fuel costs when you optimize territories.

According to research by consulting firm Pace Productivity, sales reps only spend an average of 26% of their time making sales . But with territory mapping software and route mapping, your sales teams can optimize schedules, almost eliminating planning time but boosting precious face-to-face time.

Using these solutions, you can ensure your top performers are productive, cost-effective, and focused on closing more deals.

Your business can grow sustainably

Over time, your customer distribution changes due to shifting market demand, increased competition, or other outside influences (economic, social). With a complete view of your territories, you can predict these market fluctuations and adjust your sales strategies.

For example, mapping software lets you identify underperforming regions that need support. By centralizing your data and incorporating location analytics, you can discover trends in the big picture or drill down to learn more about individual territories and clients.

Moreover, territory mapping tools can help you leverage scenario planning, allowing you to identify expansion opportunities and grow your customer base.

You hire better

The knowledge, skills, and experience of your sales reps are crucial to the success of your business, especially during times of uncertainty.

According to a 2018 report from The Bridge Group, a sales consulting firm focused on B2B optimization, the average sales rep tenure continues to decline . In 2010, reps stayed an average of three years at each job. In 2018, that was down to just 1.5 years.

Balanced, equitable sales territories with enough opportunity for success boost sales rep morale. So how do you keep your top earners longer? Design balanced and fair territories. When you achieve balance, you give every salesperson a chance for success.

Combine that with a manageable workload, and you have a winning formula for keeping talent.But when someone leaves, you need to act fast. Gaps in your coverage can be an opportunity or a threat to your business.

The opportunity to merge or absorb one territory into another can unlock new efficiencies. A territory map maker with optimization capabilities means you can accomplish your task in minutes. The threat is that a vacant territory opens the area to greater competitive activity, and customers may move.

Onboarding a new rep is much easier when using a territory map. It's much easier for a new sales rep to get started when their territory, leads, and customers are in front of them. And, since the sales manager has access to the same data, they can help a new rep with targeting and creating a plan.

How to create a sales territory plan: Our step-by-step guide

We've covered what a sales territory plan is and why you need it. Now let's look in detail at sales territory planning best practices and how to use them to design sales territories tailored to your needs.

Before mapping your territories, assess your customers, prospects, and market penetration. It helps you align your territory management plan with your business goals.

You'll need to use data and insights from your CRM, ERP, and spreadsheets to create a complete plan.

Need a sales territory plan template to get you started? Use our sales territory planning template and start boosting your sales productivity today!

The first step to creating a successful sales territory plan is collecting and analyzing market data. Include an assessment of buying trends, past sales targets and performance, competitor activity, and other relevant data points.

The more detailed your information, the better prepared you'll be during the territory mapping stage. Some critical questions you should answer include the following:

• Where are your customers located?
• Which industries do you serve?
• Which regions are underperforming?
• Which region over-performs?
• What's the sales potential for each territory?
• How are buying trends influencing your sales performance in specific areas?
• Which service-related inefficiencies are leading to missed business opportunities?
• How might future demand for your products/services affect your sales territory plan?

These questions will help base your sales territories on current and future needs. You need to think beyond just geography and look at opportunity and workload.

So, you've analyzed your business operations, sales performance, and market context. The next step is to segment your customers into groups.

When creating a sales territory plan, avoiding giving too much weight to any one characteristic is essential. For example, organizing your customers into rigid industry-based categories can help you prioritize sales rep assignments. But it can also force them to cover a wider geographic area.

When sales teams regularly cross state lines to meet with customers and prospects from specific verticals, the fuel costs and travel times are much higher (unless you leverage the accounts-based territory design model).

Instead, sales managers should use several data points in their territory management framework allowing for more flexible segmentation and can help maximize resources.

When categorizing your existing and prospective clients, be sure to consider the following:

• Customer and prospect locations
• Industry type, size, and everyday use cases for your products/services
• Behavioral trends (spending habits, the likelihood of repeat sales, revenue potential, etc.)
• Client delivery and sales support expectations
• Regional competition (high vs. low risk of losing business to a competitor)

Combining these insights can provide a big-picture view of your current sales performance and help find areas of improvement. Keep in mind your customer segments will undoubtedly change over time.

The ability to quickly rebalance customer groups and realign territories should be a primary goal. Without some level of flexibility, your sales management strategies may fail to deliver the results you're hoping for.

Once you've organized your customers and prospects into groups, the next step is to assess internal and external factors that affect your business performance.

Conducting a SWOT analysis will help you identify your sales team's strengths and weaknesses, making it easier to assign the right rep to high-value or challenging accounts.

The popular business and financial education website Investopedia defines SWOT analysis as a "framework used to evaluate a company's competitive position and to develop strategic planning."

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These considerations are crucial to building an effective sales territory plan, so take your time before moving on.

Here's a quick breakdown of each phase of the SWOT analysis process:

Strengths: Note your organization and team strengths and be as open and honest as possible. A territory planning perspective starting point might be identifying territories with solid performance and the reasons behind that.

Are you strong in specific verticals? Is your team better organized and focused than your competition? Do you offer better service levels? Is your sales training and coaching a strength?

Weaknesses: Are there geographic regions where performance is weak? Do you have some fragile customer relationships? Is your marketing spend lower than the competition? Are your sales territories out of balance? Are your sales team over or under-worked?

What other weaknesses might you have?

Opportunities: What growth opportunities are available to you? Can you grow your territory footprint by expanding into new areas? Can you split/merge sales territories? Are there competitor accounts you can win? Are some existing customers expanding? Can you increase your share of wallet with customers? Do you have new products to launch?

Threats: Everyone knows that sales are a highly competitive profession. Understanding specific threats in your selling environment can make a big difference. When conducting a SWOT analysis, you should consider competitors vying for market share, changes in demand, and time wasted on low-value tasks.

The final step in the sales territory planning process is to combine your data, market research, and business goals into a single package.

Sales managers should create clear parameters for their sales teams. That includes realistic goals, information on who to target, and more. It will help you develop more balanced sales territories upfront and allow you to pivot down the line.

Some critical questions you should ask include:

• Where are your highest-value accounts located?
• How will you organize sales territories to capitalize on your sales team's strengths?
• Which regions may need more sales support?
• Where are the primary sources of new leads, and why?
• What quotas do you have for sales reps?
• What resources do your sales teams need to grow?

While drawing out your sales territories by hand is possible, territory mapping software gives you the advantage. It's easier, faster and allows you to make data-driven decisions.

With eSpatial's territory mapping software, you can quickly upload data from Salesforce and other CRMs, ERP systems, and spreadsheets. You can use this data to create your territory maps or analyze it further using the following:

• Radius maps

Alongside customizable data visualizations, eSpatial offers a suite of specialized tools. They make your sales territory plan more efficient and cost-effective.

For example, route planning lets your field sales reps map out their entire day and find the quickest path from the office to customer locations.

You can see how territories perform, compare, and create maps to communicate data to C-suite decision-makers. Tracking your sales success and failures is crucial, as it allows you to pivot your sales strategies and capitalize on new lines of business in real-time.

A sales territory plan is dynamic. You must adjust to keep your territories balanced and your top performers satisfied.

Creating interactive territory maps transforms raw data into actionable insights. You can find the hidden details that help you increase sales efficiency and effectiveness. Ultimately, that means more conversions, higher ROI, and flexible sales processes.

Learn How eSpatial Can Improve Your Sales Territory Plan

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Sales Territory Planning and Management: What You Need to Know

Published: June 09, 2023

One of the essential pillars of a successful business is an effective sales territory strategy.

Sales territory planning requires careful thought and consideration — getting it right the first time is crucial. Constant changes in territory division can dampen your sales team's productivity and take a toll on employee morale. And from the client’s perspective, frequent changes in account managers can lead to unstable relationships and create a higher risk for churn.

In this post, we'll cover exactly how to execute sales territory planning and management that keeps your team and your customers in mind. You'll also get best practices for sales territory design, alignment, and the rules of sales territory engagement.

Understanding, planning, and managing sales territories can make or break your sales efforts. Your reps need a firm grasp on the specific customer segments they’re responsible for and the general framework of your team’s territories overall. Only then can your team successfully close deals using this strategy.

How you structure, define, and distribute the territories you work with has massive implications for your organization’s sales efficiency and bottom line.

A strategic sales territory design, exceptional territory management, and sales territory alignment are the building blocks of a successful sales territory plan . So here’s some perspective on how to do them right.

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Building a Sales Territory Plan

If you choose to design your sales territories without a plan, you’ll quickly find that your resources and budget are disappearing faster than your ROI can keep up. Sound familiar?

If you're on borrowed time and money quarter after quarter trying to prospect and close new business, get familiar with these sales territory rules of engagement below.

1. Define your market.

To effectively set up territories, sales leaders must first understand the environment of their business. There are numerous ways for a business to define a market. Factors could include geography, size, and consumer demographics, competition, and more. But starting with internal company factors is key.

Take a look at your company's core values, goals, and revenue. Which segment of your customer base is most aligned with these and generating the most revenue for the business?

Once you identify who this group is, look for similar niche markets that your sales team could tap into. For example, if your most profitable customers are in the consumer packaged goods sector, try targeting niche sectors of this industry like food & beverage or health & beauty products. These could become new territories for your business.

Know what is unique to your business and prioritize based on what your climate demands. Targeting a profitable market segment as its own sales territory will lead to lowered overhead costs, increased sales, and reduced customer churn.

2. Assess account quality.

After you've identified the perfect target market for your sales territory, you'll need to evaluate the value of each account within the market. The measurement could be either quantitative or qualitative , depending on the product or service your business offers.

For example, a beverage company might rank the value of its accounts by net profitability. In contrast, a company that relies heavily on customer recommendations could focus on accounts that are more likely to provide a referral for their company.

By determining the value of each account, you can prioritize each one in your sales territory planning. That way, your sales team understands which accounts are reflected in their quota metrics and can give these accounts the attention they deserve.

3. Determine territory quality.

After assessing the quality of each account, it’s time to determine how qualified the territory is as a whole. As with the accounts’ values, this process is subjective based on different business needs and priorities.

Continuing the consumer packaged goods example, if you have a food & beverage territory and a health & beauty territory, you may realize that each of them has different sales cycles, churn rates, and even repeat purchases. These are just a few examples of factors that could affect the quality of a sales territory.

Internally, you may decide that the sales cycle is the biggest determinant of territory quality and use this factor to rank each one from highest to lowest. A shorter sales cycle for the health & beauty territory could mean a quicker ROI for your team, so you could rank health & beauty as a higher quality territory than the food & beverage territory.

To get a better picture of territory value, include your sales team in these discussions. After all, no one knows the territories better than the reps who work within them each day. This way, you can assign the appropriate reps to maximize the potential of each territory.

4. Understand your sales reps’ strengths.

The next step of effective territory management may be the most important of all. After determining the quality of each sales territory, you must assign reps with the applicable skills to develop and optimize each one.

An example of an excellent sales territory assignment is assigning a territory defined by large enterprise deals to a rep who has experience closing big deals.

Now this isn't to say that as a sales leader you should cherry pick certain reps to work certain territories. This step represents the opposite. Instead of relegating reps to highly specialized roles to the point of creating silos, you can cultivate an environment of continuous learning. Use the expertise of each sales rep to introduce best practices for each territory that can be passed on to other team members.

By strategically assigning qualified reps to accounts, you will empower your entire team to deliver an amazing buying experience for your clients.

5. Review your sales territory plan.

The four steps outlined above will prepare your business to put a sales territory plan into action, but you'll need to do a final diagnosis of costs associated with each territory. Analyzing cost metrics will help you as a sales leader zero in on specific inefficiencies in the system and solve for them.

There are several ways to identify these industries, but I recommend you start with customer acquisition cost or CAC. By using this metric, you'll quickly come up with a list of costs associated with prospecting and closing each deal. You can even compare CAC over time, against competitors, or against industry standards to determine what a healthy CAC should be for the territory.

6. Design the final plan.

The last step of building a sales territory plan is to put it all together by designing your sales territories.

There are some strides businesses can take to ensure their sales territory management is as efficient and effective as possible. Below are some of the sales territory management best practices.

1. Put a stellar sales leader in place.

A sales territory plan is pretty much useless when you don't have the right sales leader in place to guide its execution. This person will be responsible for sales territory development, team management, and stakeholder alignment, so take your time and do your research when filling this role.

As you're considering promoting your next sales territory manager from within or hiring one externally, check out our post on what to look for in a good sales territory manager .

2. Practice sound cadence management.

Proper cadence management — the process of prioritizing, structuring, timing, and conducting account interactions — is central to successful sales territory management efforts. Your reps need to gauge account priority level, group accounts based on that assessment, and determine the best frequency, pattern, and nature of touches between them and contacts.

Cadences will differ from territory to territory. It might take some trial and error, but properly managing territories often hinges upon how you contact the prospects you’re trying to reach within each one.

3. Consistently keep track of your data and customer needs.

Territory management is agile by nature. You can’t expect a specific territory to remain stagnant in how it responds to your sales strategies. Customer circumstances change, and you need to be able to quickly adapt to them.

That’s why your reps need to keep records of their sales data in a CRM — making sure you’re keeping tabs on what is and isn’t working for you. Have reps maintain notes from their appointments and keep them on record. Stay abreast of every trend within all your territories to ensure they’re being catered to as effectively as possible.

4. Don’t forget to pursue new leads.

Effective sales territory management isn’t specific to existing accounts. Though this is a crucial component of the process, it’s not the only one. Always pursue new business — one way or another.

That doesn’t mean forgetting about current accounts. You still need to keep them happy — particularly high-volume ones. But if you want to grow your business, you have to consistently pursue new opportunities within your territories. Both kinds of customers serve an essential function to the health of your business, so both need their fair share of attention.

Remote Territory Management

Not all sales territories require an in-person presence, and there are instances when your reps will have to work remotely. If this is the case, your reps still need to abide by the best practices mentioned above, but in all likelihood, they’ll need to adjust their cadence.

A cadence that rests on in-person interactions will have to change if those interactions can’t happen anymore. It might mean finding a new progression that incorporates more phone time and remote tools like video calls.

It might take some trial and error, but you have to land on a cadence better suited to handle remote interactions — and that might not look like the one your reps are used to using.

In addition to adjusting cadence, you may have to adapt your sales territory plan to changes in the market or internally within the company. This is where sales territory alignment comes in.

The most common way sales territory alignment occurs is geographically, especially for remote sales teams who work in the field and meet customers face-to-face. If you notice that there's increased demand for your product or service in the northeast region, you can restrict the territory to the area with the most concentrated demand and expand the corresponding team in that area.

You may have to align your sales territories three to four years, but as often as every year can be normal for fast-paced industries like technology, medical sales, and real estate.

Final Thoughts

An effective sales territory design can be the difference between well-organized, cohesive, successful sales efforts and inefficient, scattershot wastes of resources.

If you understand and implement the sales territory rules of engagement discussed in this article, you can increase your chances of success no matter the territory you find yourself in.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Sales Territory 101: Defining, Planning & Mapping Territories

Learn this comprehensive step-by-step process for define, plan, implement, and optimize sales territories for optimal market coverage and revenue growth.

Sales territories are groups of accounts that share certain similarities, allowing sales teams to specialize. This specialization can lead to a more repeatable and efficient sales process. Historically, geography often defined sales territories because sales were conducted in person. However, as digital sales gain prominence, the approach to defining sales territories is evolving. Understanding and effectively managing sales capacity is crucial to driving organizational growth and achieving sales goals.

This blog will explore why sales territories are necessary, different types of territories, and steps to create them, enriched with real-world examples and expert insights.

What is a Sales Territory?

A sales territory is a defined market segment for which a salesperson or a sales team is responsible. In simple terms, territories divide your target market into smaller segments that reps can better manage. For example, back in the day, one person would be assigned to the top half of the west coast of the USA while another would be manning the bottom half.

The territories you define can be based on various parameters like location, company size, industry, product line, channel partners, etc. This can also be useful when working on account-based marketing campaigns . ‍

For example:

●  A software company selling to SMBs across the US can split the country into Northeast, Midwest, South, and West sales territories. Reps based in each territory will handle that area.

●   An enterprise software company may divide its market by industry verticals. One rep handles all education/non-profit accounts; another handles healthcare accounts, and so on.

The primary goal is to create manageable sections that allow sales teams to focus their efforts and resources effectively. These territories can be defined by geography, industry, customer type, product type, or a combination of these factors. 

That said, geography doesn’t matter as much in digital sales as it used to. If you are selling a service performed by people like a circus or even heavy machinery, geography will play a role since you might wish to go and pitch your product. The same applies to an expensive product or service. However, geography won't matter much if a software or course can be sold, bought, used, and serviced anywhere.

We'll explore different types of sales territories later in this guide.

But why do we need sales territories?

Implementing sales territories provides immense strategic value for SaaS organizations. Well-defined territories lead to optimal sales coverage, increased efficiency, and higher productivity.

Let’s understand why sales territories are essential for everyone involved in the transaction: ‍ ‍

1. Customer Perspective

From the customer’s perspective, sales territories ensure they receive in-person service from sales representatives knowledgeable about specific, specialized products. Customers benefit from having a dedicated point of contact who understands their unique needs and can provide tailored solutions. Studies show that personalized service in sales territories can improve customer satisfaction by up to 20% . 2. Company Perspective

From the company’s perspective, sales territories help build competence within specific product categories or markets, leading to better predictability and coverage. This structured approach allows companies to allocate resources efficiently, track performance accurately, and adapt to market changes swiftly. Sales capacity planning involves predicting future hiring needs and balancing recruitment, ramp-up times, and churn. Effective territory planning can enhance overall sales team efficiency by 40% .

3. Salesperson Perspective

Clearly defined territories mean less overlap and conflict for salespeople, leading to higher motivation and productivity. Sales territories also provide a clear framework for sales compensation and career development. A well-designed sales territory plan can boost salesperson productivity by up to 25% .

Additional considerations in sales territory planning

• Frequency of Territory Updates

Regular updates to sales territories are essential to reflect changes in the market and business priorities. Market conditions, customer needs, and competitive landscapes can evolve, necessitating adjustments to sales territories. For example, if a company expands into new geographic regions or introduces new products, it may need to reallocate resources and adjust territories accordingly. 

Finding the right balance between stability and flexibility is crucial. Frequent changes can disrupt sales activities and impact performance, while infrequent updates may lead to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. According to Spotio, updating territories quarterly can help maintain alignment with market dynamics and maximize sales effectiveness .

• Impact on Compensation Structures

The design of sales territories can significantly impact sales compensation structures. Transparent and fair compensation plans motivate sales teams and align their efforts with company goals. Changes to territories can affect how sales representatives are compensated, potentially leading to adjustments in commission structures, bonuses, and performance metrics. Ensuring that compensation plans remain competitive and attractive, even as territories evolve, is essential. Companies should regularly review and adjust compensation structures to reflect territory changes and maintain alignment with overall business objectives. Data from Xactly indicates that aligning compensation with territory performance can lead to a 15% increase in sales results .

• Trade-offs in Territory Planning

Every approach to sales territory planning involves trade-offs. Static territories offer stability but may lack flexibility, while dynamic territories provide adaptability but can be complex to manage. Companies must evaluate their specific needs, market conditions, and business objectives to determine the best approach for their sales teams. Trade-offs include balancing the need for specialized expertise with the desire for a more flexible and responsive sales strategy. Companies should consider each approach's potential benefits and drawbacks and make informed decisions based on their unique circumstances.

Types of Sales Territories for SaaS Companies

Sales territories for SaaS companies can be defined in multiple ways depending on the nature of your business, products, and buyers.

Let’s explore the most common SaaS sales territory structures with real-world examples:

‍ ‍ 1. Geographical Territories

Geographical territories have been a traditional approach where sales regions are defined based on physical locations. This method is still relevant for physical and high-value digital products requiring face-to-face interaction. For instance, a company selling agricultural equipment may divide its territories based on states or regions, ensuring sales representatives can visit farms and build strong relationships with farmers. Similarly, pharmaceutical companies often define territories based on healthcare regions, allowing sales reps to develop in-depth knowledge of local healthcare providers and regulations. A study by HubSpot shows that geographical territories can help reduce travel costs by 20% . Geographical territories also offer several advantages. They simplify logistics, reduce travel costs, and provide a more focused approach to local marketing efforts. However, they can also present challenges, such as unequal distribution of potential customers or varying market potential across regions. Companies must regularly analyze market data and adjust territories to address these issues.One notable example is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which might sell to various sectors with differing needs. By defining sales territories based on industry, AWS can provide specialized services and solutions tailored to each sector's unique requirements.

2. Industry-Based Territories

Industry-based territories focus on sectors such as government, airlines, and telecom. This approach requires a deep understanding of industry-specific use cases and relationships. Sales teams become experts in the needs and challenges of their assigned industries, enabling them to offer highly relevant solutions. For example, a technology company might have dedicated sales teams for the healthcare, finance, and education sectors, each with tailored messaging and product offerings. Spotio highlights that industry-based territories can lead to a 25% increase in conversion rates due to specialized knowledge .Industry-based territories allow for a more targeted approach to sales. Sales representatives can speak the language of their industry, understand regulatory requirements, and build strong relationships with key stakeholders. This expertise can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty. However, significant investment in training and development is required to ensure that sales teams are well-versed in industry-specific knowledge.

3. Customer Type Territories

Defining territories based on customer types involves segmenting the market by customer size, purchase behavior, or lifecycle stage. This method allows sales teams to tailor their strategies to the unique requirements of different customer segments, whether small businesses, large enterprises, or key accounts. For instance, a software company might assign sales teams to small, mid-sized, and large enterprises, each with distinct needs and buying processes. Small businesses require more straightforward solutions and cost-effective pricing, while large enterprises may need customized solutions and dedicated support.Customer-type territories enable sales teams to specialize in addressing each segment's unique challenges and opportunities. This specialization can improve the relevance of sales pitches, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive better results. However, it also requires careful segmentation and may lead to a more complex management structure.

‍ 4. Product Type Territories

Product-type territories assign sales teams to specific product lines or services. This approach is efficient for companies with diverse product portfolios. Sales teams can develop deep expertise in their assigned products, providing better support and driving higher sales. For example, a company that sells various types of industrial machinery might have separate sales teams for each product line, such as forklifts, cranes, and conveyor systems. Product-type territories allow for a focused approach to product management and sales. Sales representatives can become experts in their assigned products, better understand customer needs, and offer more specialized solutions. However, this approach may require additional resources and coordination to ensure that sales efforts are aligned with overall business goals and that customers receive comprehensive support across product lines.

5. New Business vs Renewals Territories

An account can also be divided between new business reps focused on landing net new customers and renewal reps who manage ongoing subscription revenue.

New business requires more outbound prospecting while renewals need customer success skills. Separate territories prevent mixed focus.

6. Channel Sales Territories

If part of your sales goes through reseller partners, you can have dedicated partner account managers aligned to them.

For example, having an APAC channel partners territory manager who handles all partnerships in that region and works to grow revenue.

7. Named Accounts Territories

Larger SaaS firms often assign strategic accounts like Fortune 500 companies to specific reps who can customize solutions for them.

These named account territories get all the sales and marketing resources required to land massive deals.

As you can see, SaaS sales leaders have many options to define territories based on their unique situation and customer landscape.

How to Create an Effective Sales Territory Plan

Creating an optimal sales territory plan is crucial yet complex. There are many factors to consider and steps involved.

Let's go through a comprehensive, step-by-step process for designing a sales territory plan that drives growth:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

Start by clearly defining the objectives of your sales territory plan. Are you looking to increase market coverage, improve customer satisfaction, or boost sales in a particular segment? Understanding your goals will guide the entire process.

Step 2: Analyze Market Data

Conduct a thorough analysis of your market data. This includes identifying potential customers, understanding market trends, and assessing the competition. Use data analytics tools to segment your market based on relevant criteria such as geography, industry, or customer type.

Step 3: Segment Your Market

Based on your market analysis, segment your market into manageable sections. Ensure each segment is large enough to justify dedicated resources but small enough to allow personalized attention. This segmentation will form the basis of your sales territories.

Step 4: Assign Sales Teams

Assign your sales teams to the defined territories. Consider factors such as team expertise, experience, and workload. Ensure each team has the necessary resources and training to succeed in their assigned territories.

Step 5: Set Goals and Metrics

Establish clear goals and metrics for each territory. These should align with your overall business objectives and provide a basis for performance evaluation. Regularly review and adjust these goals to reflect changes in the market and business priorities.

Step 6: Implement and Monitor

Implement your sales territory plan and continuously monitor its performance. Use CRM systems and other sales tools to track progress, identify issues, and make data-driven adjustments. Regular feedback from sales teams is crucial to refine and optimize your territories. Remember to make iterative changes when it comes to sales territories to allow your sales reps time to adjust. You do not want to make knee-jerk changes that disrupt the working processes your sales teams follow.

Static vs. Dynamic Sales Territories

• Static Sales Territories

Static territories consist of a fixed set of accounts for a specified period. This approach provides stability and allows sales teams to build long-term customer relationships. However, it may need to be more responsive to market changes and evolving customer needs.

• Dynamic Sales Territories

Dynamic territories adjust based on market changes, customer intent, and sales performance. This approach is more flexible and can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges. Companies like 6sense are known for their dynamic sales territories, constantly using advanced analytics to optimize territory assignments.

Detailed Real-world Examples and Case Studies

• AWS's Industry-Based Territories

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a prime example of a company that uses industry-based sales territories. AWS segments its sales teams based on various industries, including healthcare, finance, and government. This approach allows AWS to tailor its solutions and sales strategies to each sector's needs and regulatory requirements. By focusing on industry-specific sales territories, AWS can leverage its expertise and build strong relationships with key stakeholders in each sector. This specialization enhances AWS's ability to address complex industry challenges and drive successful customer outcomes.

• Salesforce's Dynamic Approach

Salesforce employs a dynamic approach to sales territory planning, using advanced analytics to optimize territory assignments. The company monitors market conditions, customer intent, and sales performance to adjust its territories in real-time. Salesforce's dynamic approach allows it to respond quickly to market changes and seize new opportunities. By leveraging data and analytics, Salesforce can ensure that its sales teams are always focused on the most promising prospects and regions.

• 6sense's Use of Advanced Analytics

6sense is known for its innovative use of advanced analytics in sales territory planning. The company uses data-driven insights to define and adjust sales territories, enabling its teams to focus on high-potential opportunities and optimize their efforts. 6sense's approach highlights the importance of leveraging data and analytics to drive effective sales territory planning. Using advanced tools and techniques, 6sense can continuously refine its territories and achieve better results.

How Factors Helps Optimize Territories

Factors is an AI-powered Account intelligence & analytics platform that can help maximize the potential of sales territories:

1. Enriches Anonymous Traffic

Factors enriches anonymous website visitors and ad impressions with company data—revealing the company name, industry, location, and other attributes you can use to map accounts to matching sales territories.

2. Automatically Assigns Accounts to Territories

Once Factors discovers the right data, like the location, industry, account size, etc, it automatically assigns the accounts to the right reps based on the territory definitions in your CRM. You no longer have to manually assign a rep every time there’s a new lead in the system. 

3. Alerts Reps About Territory Accounts

Factors helps you automatically alert users when there are new accounts identified. You can set up Factors to automatically message users on Slack informing them about the new account. 

The best part is, Factors continuously monitors your website and other connect platforms for new leads. Your reps are alerted as soon as a new lead hits Factors (in real-time) so they can act upon the leads while they’re hot. 

4. Provides 360-Degree Territory Account View

Factors unifies cross-channel account data to provide a 360-degree view of territory accounts—including web activity, ad impressions, intent data, CRM interactions etc.

5. Enables Data-Driven Territory Optimization

It analyzes territory performance across metrics like engagement, pipeline velocity, and more. This allows data-driven planning and optimization of territories.

With Factors, you can leverage previously untapped anonymous interactions to drive more territory leads. Continuous optimization of territories also becomes easier based on hard data vs guesswork.

Key Takeaways

• Sales territories optimize market coverage, sales efficiency, and account management for your team. Ways to define territories include geographic, industry, size, products, or channels.
• Steps for creating a territory plan include choosing territory types, mapping target accounts, estimating potential, setting goals, assigning territories, configuring lead routing, and tracking performance.
• When assigning territories, take rep strengths into account, involve reps in planning, make data-driven decisions, and limit frequent realignments.
• Specialized software provides visibility into sales territories and makes territory management efficient.
• Factors enriches anonymous traffic to assign accounts to territories. It also unifies data across channels for continuous optimization.
• Well-planned sales territories ensure your reps have reasonable workloads and can nurture the right accounts. Combined with the right technology, sales territories provide immense leverage to scale revenue growth. 

Map Your Path to Sales Success with Sales Territories

Territories allow reps to go “all-in” on targeted accounts instead of spreading themselves thin. This results in higher win rates and accelerated revenue growth.

But territory success depends on getting the fundamentals right.

Choose appropriate territory characteristics based on your business model, products, and customers. Involve reps in co-creating territory plans that align with their strengths. Set up your CRM to automatically route inbound leads to the right reps. And continuously track and optimize territories based on hard data.

Factors plays a critical role here. It enriches anonymous website traffic to identify and assign accounts to matching sales territories automatically. Cross-channel analytics further fuel data-driven territory optimization.

With Factors, you can leverage previously untapped traffic to generate more territory leads on auto-pilot. It connects the dots across customer touchpoints to uncover revenue opportunities hidden within your data.

So if you're struggling with sub-optimal territory planning, take control of your revenue engine. Book a customized Factors demo today to see how it can help optimize your sales territories.

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The 5-Step Guide to Creating a Balanced Sales Territory Plan for Your Team

Properly divided sales territories can make a world of difference for your team and your business.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to redesign or expand your existing territory management strategy, there are plenty of benefits to having a comprehensive sales territory plan.

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Creating a balanced sales territory plan helps ensure you’re targeting the right customers at the right times and assigning the right accounts to the right reps. This also allows you to reduce your sales costs and improve productivity – which hopefully leads to even more sales.

What is a sales territory?

Traditionally, a sales territory refers to a geographical area assigned to an individual salesperson or team. However, a more modern definition encompasses sales territories created around certain types of customer and audience segments.

For example, other characteristics that can be used to define a sales territory include sales potential, industry, product, customer type, purchase history, and referral source.

How to Create a Sales Territory Plan for Your Team

If you struggle with sales territory management or your current territories are unevenly serviced, follow this step-by-step guide to put together a better sales territory plan for your sales team .

Step 1: Analyze and Segment Your Existing Customers

Before you can develop an effective sales territory plan, you need to take stock of your existing clients, prospects, and leads. Start by dividing your customers into segments based on location, vertical, purchase history, or another relevant characteristic.

Take note of which verticals your team is experiencing the most success with, where they’re located, and how they’re making purchases. For example, does this type of customer buy online with minimal relationship nurturing? Or do they often require an in-person demo to convert?

If possible, pick out your top ten prospects or customers and identify any common characteristics they share.

Not only must you know who your customers are and where they are located, but you should also be able to answer the following questions about each segment:

• What are your customers buying? Are certain solutions, services, or products outperforming others?
• Why are your customers buying? What pain points does your offering solve?
• Which events lead to purchases?
• Which events lead prospects to not buy?
• What is your conversion rate? Where do conversions tend to drop off?

Answering these questions will help you spot overarching trends in the market and better segment your territories.

Step 2: Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Next, complete a basic SWOT analysis to clearly identify your team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

What is your team good at? Where do your sales reps excel? Maybe some of your team members deliver awesome in-person demos , while others work best over phone and email.

Is there a particular stage of the sales process where leads tend to lose interest? Are there any bottlenecks or leaks in your pipeline that must be addressed?

Opportunities

Based on the current marketplace and your customer segments, is there an untapped market or under-serviced territory that more of your reps should sell to?

What are the biggest threats to your success in a given territory? Is there a competitor fighting for the same market share in a particular vertical, location, or customer segment?

Step 3: Set Goals and Establish Targets

Whether you’re mapping out a new territory management plan for the whole team or redefining a specific rep’s sales territory, it’s always best to set clear parameters and tangible goals. The easier your goals are to measure and track, the better.

To ensure you come up with specific, practical targets for each territory, ask yourself and your team the following questions:

• Looking at our sales pipeline coverage , how many new opportunities do we need to add to meet quota?
• Where are most of our new leads coming from?
• Which geographical regions should we focus on?
• Are any of our territories being underserviced? If so, how many reps should we assign to those territories?
• Which products are the most profitable? Which customers are purchasing them?
• Which customer segment offers the highest payoff? Are we tapping into that value consistently?

Once you know what you want to achieve, give your team clear objectives for each territory, such as, “We need to sign five new customers in this region this quarter” or “We want to double the number of accounts we serve in this vertical by next year.”

Step 4: Develop a Tangible Strategy

Now that you have clear customer segments and goals, you’re ready to create a plan with your reps to target the most lucrative segments and get the most coverage possible.

Assign individual reps to specific regions or markets. Use the information you collected in steps 1-3 to take sales potential into consideration to ensure even distribution.

Try to match team members’ skill sets to the type of territory you assign them. If one of your reps has already established relationships with prospects in a particular territory, try to give them jurisdiction over those accounts.

Looking at your customer segments, decide how often different types of accounts should be contacted. Look at whether or not they require in-person visits to be handled by field reps or whether most of your accounts can be handled remotely.

When creating your strategy, keep the following questions in mind:

• What resources do you reps need to manage the accounts assigned to them?
• What else does your team need to succeed in reaching the goals and milestones you’ve set for them?
• How will you boost conversions in each territory?
• Are there opportunities to further penetrate underserviced territories?

Step 5: Track Your Results and Optimize Territory Division

The last (and longest-lasting) step is putting your new sales territory plan into action. It’s important to continually measure your progress to see how your new territory plan impacts sales.

For instance, have sales increased in a specific region or market? Is there a large disparity between sales in different territories? Is one rep struggling to keep up with leads while another is barely meeting their quota? Is there a market that seems underserviced that needs additional reps assigned to it?

If any of your territories or reps are underperforming, make an effort to find out why and implement adjustments as necessary.

Sales Territory Management Best Practices

Sales managers can maintain even territory distribution and set their reps up for success by adhering to the following best practices.

• Create a call rotation schedule so you can keep in touch with all your accounts. Determine how much contact each account requires to determine how often your reps should reach out. Consider whether the customer requires a physical meeting to renew their contract or can be managed over the phone.
• Account for seasonal buying trends so you always contact the right territory at the right time of year. Reach out when your customers are most likely to be ready to buy again.
• Prioritize long-term results. Although it’s important to address fresh leads whenever they come up, you shouldn’t let unqualified opportunities distract from the big picture plan. Encourage reps to stick to their call schedule even when new leads appear.
• Go beyond geographic sales territories. Depending on what you’re selling and who your targets are, dividing up leads by geography might not be the best choice – especially if your reps don’t usually travel to meet clients in person. In many cases, it makes more sense to divvy up customers by industry, referral source, product, or account size.

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How to Build an Effective Sales Territory Plan

Meet Morgan. A hard-working seller. Focused and productive. Morgan’s developed strong sales skills and knows what it takes to sell.

At the end of the year, does Morgan hit target? Beat it by 20%? Fall short by 30%?

Does Morgan know:

• How many sales they need to win?
• At what revenue levels?
• From which sources: inbound leads, prospecting efforts, and referrals?
• How many sales are needed from new accounts versus existing accounts?

And as the months and the quarters pass, does Morgan know the current status and the metrics needed in order to stay on—or ahead of—target? If the metrics show things are falling behind, can Morgan get a sense of what’s working and what’s not to make adjustments?

Feeling confident about the answers to these questions is the essence of territory planning.

What is a Sales Territory Plan?

A territory plan is a specific, defensible plan to achieve a sales target.

In fact, research from RAIN Group Center for Sales Research shows Top-Performing Sales Managers are 52% more likely to excel at planning and analyzing how sellers should manage their territories.

Note the definition of a territory plan doesn’t include anything about the geography the seller covers. A common mistake sellers and managers make is confusing the word “territory” with “geography.”

A territory is sometimes based on geography, but it can also be based on accounts, account types (existing, new, size, growth potential), audience segments (titles, industries, offering areas), or something else.

Most sellers and managers need to broaden their thinking around what the Sales Territory Plan is.

How to Build a Sales Territory Plan

Benefits of sales territory planning, 3 key areas of sales territory planning, elements of a sales territory planner, finalizing your plan, 7 tips for successful sales territory planning, one final thought.

Territory planning, when done right, is powerful and important for reasons including:

• Defines specifics: A sales territory plan focuses sellers and sales managers on the who, what, when, where, and why specifics of achieving the sales target.
• Inspires seller clarity of action: A specific plan drives daily seller clarity of action. When sellers know, with confidence, what to do with their time each day, they’re more likely to do it, do it with gusto, and not simply react to and get distracted by everything that comes across their desks.
• Builds belief in achieving target: A sales territory plan helps sellers and managers build belief that they can achieve their target. Our research shows 39% of sellers do not believe their targets are achievable—which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, when sellers know what needs to happen to achieve their targets, they believe more strongly that they can achieve it.
• Align sellers to the right targets: Sales territory plans help to align sellers to the right buyers, accounts, and geographies best suited to their success before they spend months working in areas that won’t yield the best results for them.
• Allows for progress measurement and adjustment: Sales territory plans allow for analysis of whether sellers are on target and allow for thoughtful adjustment when sellers fall behind.
• Creates strategic alignment: Sellers working without a specific, defensible plan will too often take actions that lead them to a destination that’s not consistent with the company’s or team’s goals.

The outcome of a strong territory plan—along with strong weekly and daily planning to execute the plan—is seller focus, productivity, and results.

Without a specific, defensible territory plan sellers are likely to experience:

• Meandering effort, moving from task to task without a clear sense of purpose
• Lack of effort, as clear plans and actions drive motivation and productivity
• Lack of belief in their ability to achieve their goals
• Lack of ability to calibrate as conditions change, some areas don’t pan out, and they fall behind

In addition to leaving sales results to chance, the lack of a specific territory plan can also result in poor morale, defensiveness, and finger-pointing. Even more reason to double down on territory planning.

There are three key areas to focus on in sales territory management for both sales managers and sellers:

• Territory plan development , which focuses on producing the actionable, defensible plan
• Target setting , which is both a science and an art, and difficult to get right, but when target setting is demonstrably not right, it throws everything off
• Tracking and adjusting , which means regularly checking progress against the plan, and making necessary adjustments to achieve the goal

The territory-planning content here is for both sellers to build their own plans and for sales managers to help sellers build plans. Whether you’re doing it alone or collaboratively as a team, it’s the same process and content.

If you’re a sales manager and you need to build territory plans for your team, there’s nothing more to it than building the plans one-by-one and then viewing them together as a whole. When you do that, you can make sure the collection of individual plans will get the whole team where it needs to go, and that proper boundaries are set up so sellers don’t pursue the same targets or opportunities more often than they should.

Using a Sales Territory Planner

The outcome of a territory planning process is—you guessed it—a plan. We use RAIN Group’s Sales Territory Planner with our clients. It includes the essential components to build an effective territory plan, whether you’re a sales manager helping your team to build plans or a seller building your own.

The elements of a sales territory planner include:

Sales Targets

This includes quota (the company’s target for the seller) and stretch target (the seller’s own target which may be above the company-set target).

• Sales results from the previous year (total quota, actual revenue, % of target achieved)
• Breakdown by category (e.g., existing accounts, new business inbound, new business outbound, referral)
• Revenue breakdown by offering type (e.g., products, services, solutions)
• Factors contributing to the previous year’s results
• Current year plan, including targets and current weighted average pipeline

Plan to Achieve Overall Target

• Accounts, including current and plan-year revenue
• # of leads needed
• # of proposals/quotes
• Average deal size
• Total revenue
• Targeting, specify territories including existing accounts , target accounts, geographies, industries, and audience segments
• Lead indicators and pipeline metrics (e.g., initial meetings, conversion, proposals or quotes delivered, proposal size value, discounting %, average historical repeat business %)
• Lag indicators (e.g., sales won, average size of sale, repeat business %)
• Targets by quarter
• Metrics review, including rhythm for reviews and who will review

Plan Confidence and Commentary

• Reasons the plan is achievable
• Top priorities to achieve the plan
• Top areas for learning or improving to achieve the plan
• Top potential results derailers, including the top risks that can derail success and what you can do to mitigate

The list above serves as a guide for sellers to consider what’s important to them, or for sales managers to consider on behalf of the sellers they’re helping. It’s okay to leave some sections off if they aren’t important to achieving the goal.

In any case, the desired outcome is a specific, defensible plan to achieve the goal. When it’s complete, look at the plan. Can you state confidently:

• I believe I can execute this plan
• If I execute this plan, I am confident I’ll achieve my goal

If you feel confident in your plan and are committed to executing it, sign the planner document and share it with your manager or someone you work with closely. Research has shown that people who make a commitment contract increase their chances of success .

If you don’t feel confident now, the best thing to do is to go back and work through the plan to build your confidence, and then sign it.

Then go forth and achieve your goals.

People who are strong at territory planning often say, “I wish I knew what I know now several years ago, when I did this for the first time.”

Here are the key tips experienced sales managers and sellers say helped them to become skilled at territory planning.

• Use the RAIN Sales Territory Planner as a checklist. If something is important to you or your company, don’t skip it or give it short shrift.
• Build plans for yourself or your teams that give you confidence you can beat the plan by at least 20% or so. If you do, you might find yourself doing just that! If you fall short, you might still beat your quota. But if you plan for only achieving your quota and fall short of that, you don’t leave any wiggle room for success. Set your sights high and plan to achieve stretch goals.
• If numbers aren’t your area of strength, get help. You need leads, accounts, and sales wins of certain sizes to hit your goals. It’s critical to map this out. Sellers who don’t, often find themselves not even knowing they’re well behind their goals until halfway into the year and then, when it becomes evident, they can’t catch up.

Make assumptions that are based on reality and are defensibly achievable. For example, we’ve seen plans where sellers expect to win 65% of proposed sales. But then they find out that Top Performers at their company only average 55%.

Other times, we’ve seen sellers say they need “two new business meetings per week,” only to find out, when they play out the pipeline math, they need three. This might seem small, but if they only get two meetings each week for a year when they need three, they can find themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more—short of their target. When they see they need three meetings, they change their action plans to avoid this problem.

• Consider sales cycle times. What you do for activity in the last quarter of the year might not yield until the next year. Make sure you have enough in play early enough to meet your target. If your sales cycle is longer or shorter than a quarter, plan for that.
• Read the plan and ask, “On first read, does anything stand out as not logical or achievable?”
• Go through each area and ask, “Do I have confidence or doubt in this area?”
• Question each metric, such as average size of sale, win rate on proposed sales, meetings needed to fill the pipeline, revenue expected from accounts, and so on, to challenge if they are reasonable.
• Ask, regarding the whole plan, “Will the seller (or I) implement this?” If there’s a question about execution of the plan, back up and ask why.
• Ask for the whole plan, “If the seller (or I) implements this, will they be likely to achieve the goal?” If there’s a question about the likelihood the plan will work, back up and ask why.

Overall, when it comes to challenging the plan, the key is to make sure you apply intense scrutiny. It may take less than an hour for you or someone else to do it, but that hour can be the key to a whole year of success or failure.

If the territory plan stands up to scrutiny, it’s defensible. If not, then you still have some work to do to complete the plan.

Finally, you’re done when you believe in the plan confidently. Once you’re here, sign the plan—even if that’s just for yourself. You’re making a commitment to implement it, and you’ll hit the ground running.

On the flip side, if a seller and manager work on a plan diligently and still can’t figure out what to do to achieve the goal with reasonable likelihood, escalate the discussion. You might find a more senior manager can help you develop a plan you all can believe in.

As Sun Tzu famously wrote, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” When it comes to sales, “actions without plans” is about much the same thing. But if you have a strong plan you’re confident in, and you stay on it, you will have much stronger odds of meeting — or exceeding — your sales goal.

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• Sales Mapping

6 Steps to Building a Strong Sales Territory Plan

• On Aug 5, 2020

An effective sales territory plan improves the efficiency and performance of your entire team. Assigning territories to each of your reps makes dividing up accounts easy, ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to make a sale. With this strategy, customers always deal with the same rep, resulting in better customer relationship management.

Today’s businesses have access to software that makes building a sales territory plan is easier than ever. Tools like Maptive plot all your customers on an interactive map, greatly simplifying the process of creating effective territories.

Are you thinking about creating a sales territory plan for your business? Does your current plan need to be adjusted?

Keep reading to learn how sales territory planning works and how to do it effectively.

Table of Contents

What is Sales Territory Planning?

Sales territory planning is the process of dividing your service area into different geographic regions that can be assigned to dedicated sales representatives. 

Once a person is assigned a territory, they are responsible for any existing accounts in that region and new customers within those boundaries. They also generate leads and prospects in the area to bring in new business.

Why is Sales Territory Planning Important?

Creating a good sales territory plan streamlines the sales process. The obvious benefit is that sales and accounts are divided fairly, leading to a more equitable workplace.

While this is important, it’s far from the only benefit. Here are a few other reasons why sales territory planning is critical for your business:

Employee Retention

Salespeople want the opportunity to succeed and grow within their roles, but this can’t happen when a few team members are taking all the sales for themselves. If your staff feel like they aren’t given a chance to reach their full potential, they may start looking elsewhere for employment. 

This could result in you losing talented people to your competitors simply because you don’t have a proper sales territory plan. Hiring and onboarding new sales reps is also costly, so you want to reduce turnover as much as possible.

By creating sales territories, you make sure that everyone has a chance to achieve their goals. This means a higher employee retention rate and a positive reputation for your business.

Personalized Service

Have you ever dealt with a company that makes you talk to a different person each time you call? Every time you speak to someone, you have to repeat the same information about your business and your problems before they can help you.

By having a dedicated rep for each territory, your customers will always deal with the same person. In addition, sales reps will get to know their customers’ businesses and offer more personalized solutions to address their needs.

Compare Sales Territories

Once your territories are in place, you’ll have access to a wide range of data, including sales, customers, revenue, and more. This makes it easy to compare one region to another to see where you’re performing well and where you have room for improvement.

Say one of your territories is underperforming. Without any data, it isn’t easy to know why. Is the sales rep assigned to that area not meeting expectations? Or are your products and services just not resonating with the demographics located there? Digging into the data can help you solve these problems.

Conversely, you can look at sales territories that are outperforming other regions to gather important insights. For example, what is the sales rep in the area doing differently? Can the tactics being used there be applied to other territories to increase sales?

Answering these types of questions can help you take your business to the next level.

Make Adjustments as Your Business Grows

Sales territory planning isn’t over once your territories are established. Remember, as your business grows, your sales territory plan needs to grow along with it.

For example, what happens if one of your reps lands an exceptionally large account? While this is great for both them and the business, it presents a problem for the other customers in their territory. Suddenly, the rep doesn’t have as much time to follow up on leads and service other customers.

As your customer distribution changes, your territories will need to be adjusted. And as your customer base grows, you’ll eventually need to divide up existing territories and hire new staff. 

Reduce Travel Costs

One of the biggest expenses associated with outbound sales is travel costs. The further your reps have to travel, the more it’s going to cost you, so it makes sense for you to reduce driving time as much as possible.

By assigning your sales reps to customers that are located nearby, you’ll ensure they never have to travel too far to get to their next sales meeting. This means less fuel consumption and fewer repairs to their vehicles.

It also means they can meet with more customers in a single day, which will lead to added sales for your business.

Factors to Consider When Planning Sales Territories

It’s clear that established sales territories can benefit your business in a number of ways. But what goes into actually creating them? Here are three factors you should consider:

• Distribution of Your Current Customers: Customer distribution should be your number one concern when creating sales territories. Make sure your accounts are divided up evenly. As your distribution changes, you may need to make adjustments to keep things balanced.
• Where You Predict New Customers Will Come From: Are you targeting certain regions with marketing and promotions? Do your products and services appeal to specific demographics? Make sure to factor this in when drawing the boundaries of your sales territories.
• Population: The more people who live in a given area, the more opportunity to make sales. More densely populated areas may need to be split into several smaller territories, while more rural areas require one larger territory.

How to Create a Sales Territory Plan in 6 Steps

Are you ready to create your sales territories? Don’t rush into it. To do it right, there are several steps you should take.

The best sales territory plans are built with extensive research and reliable data. The last thing you want is to spend a large amount of time drawing your territories only to have to redo the process a few months down the road.

When creating your territories, there are six steps you need to follow:

1. Define Your Larger Sales Goals

Before you begin your plan, you should figure out what exactly you’re looking to achieve. Then, once you establish your long-term goals, you can build your territories with them in mind.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself:

• How many sales should each territory generate?
• Is it realistic to expect the same results from each territory, or do you expect some regions to outperform others?
• What can you do to set up each territory for success? 
• Which reps will give you the best chance to reach your goals?

After answering these questions, you should have a clearer picture of how your territories need to be drawn.

2. Analyze Your Prospects and Customers

Next, you’ll want to analyze your past performance to see if any trends should be considered when creating your territories.

Most importantly, you need to understand your customers. To do this, answer the following questions:

• What is your ideal customer profile? Refer to your data to get the most accurate results.
• Where are your customers most likely to be located? Cities, suburbs, rural areas?
• What regions are currently performing the best? Why?
• What regions are currently underperforming? Why?
• Are there any opportunities to expand your customer base? Which segments of the population have the best chance of becoming customers?

Get to the bottom of these questions to predict where your sales are most likely to come from. This will make it easier to create sales territories that are more evenly balanced.

3. Determine Your Total Addressable Market

Your total addressable market (TAM) is the maximum amount of money you can make selling your products and services. Essentially, it’s a way to measure the level of demand for what you’re selling.

While it’s important to base your territories on your current customers, you also need to plan for the future. Figuring out your TAM will help you identify potential opportunities that are available to your business and new regions or segments of the population that need to be a part of your plan.

There are three ways to calculate your TAM:

• Top-Down: Use industry research from reliable experts to estimate the potential demand for your products and services.
• Bottom-Up: Take your current sales and apply them to the entire customer base of your market or industry.
• Value-Theory: Estimate the value you will provide to potential customers and determine whether you can effectively capture that value through pricing.

None of these methods are perfect, so it’s best to use a combination of all of them and base your conclusions on that. Make sure to consider these results when planning your territories.

4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Up to this point, we’ve been mainly focusing on your customer base. Now it’s time to analyze your business to see what you’re good at, what you need to improve, and what external factors could impact you.

The best way to do this is to perform a SWOT analysis. This stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A solid understanding of all of these is key to developing a winning sales territory plan.

Work your way through each area of the analysis to uncover important information about your business.

• Strengths: Look at your team as a whole. Where do they excel? What do they do best? Then observe your individual sales reps. Do any of them have special skills that can be utilized to gain an advantage? Through your analysis, you may find certain reps are better suited to specific customer types.
• Weaknesses: After you consider your strengths, you’ll need to think about your weaknesses. What does your team struggle with? Are there areas where they’re underperforming? What about individual team members? Do any of them have knowledge gaps? If any reps lack skills, consider investing in additional training.
• Opportunities: Consider your products and services. Who can they benefit the most? Create a list, then see if all the people you listed are included in your current customer base. If not, there may be untapped markets that you can take advantage of. You should also consider areas where you have fewer competitors and factors that could increase the demand for your products.
• Threats: No business is unstoppable, so it’s important to plan for the worst just in case. Could a new competitor take away some of your market share? Could a mistake result in bad press? Be sure to come up with every possible negative scenario, so you’re prepared.

Once your SWOT analysis is complete, you’ll know what areas of your market and business need attention, making it easier to create a successful sales territory plan.

5. Assign Territories with Sales Rep Experience in Mind

Assigning the right sales reps to the right territories will play a big part in your plan’s success.

Your more experienced and skilled salespeople will be able to manage a higher number of accounts at once and will be better at handling more complex deals. On the other hand, new reps need to be eased in and given a lighter workload as they grow their skills.

So, while it may seem unfair at first, assigning larger territories to some reps and smaller ones to others makes sense. In reality, you’re helping your less experienced team members by not overloading them too quickly. 

As your reps prove they can handle more responsibility, adjust your sales territory plan to accommodate the changing dynamics of your team.

6. Continuously Analyze Your Plan and Improve

No plan will be perfect right from the start. Ensure your sales territories are successful by continually analyzing and optimizing them.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t achieve the results you expected straight away. Chances are, you need to make minor adjustments to get back on track. This is part of effective sales territory management.

While tracking and analyzing your results, make sure to consider the following:

• Have overall sales increased or decreased since you implemented your plan?
• Have sales increased or decreased in a specific region?
• How do sales compare between territories? Which ones are excelling and which ones need improvement?
• Are all of your reps meeting their sales quotas?
• Do your territories need to be adjusted based on current sales and customer distribution?

Be sure to review your plan often and make changes as needed. If you stay on top of it, you should begin to see your performance improve.

What does a completed multi-state territory sales plan look like?

Mapping software like Maptive makes visualizing your sales territories easy. 

Start by plotting all of your customers and accounts, then create your territories as you see fit. Use established boundaries like zip codes, cities, counties, and states, or draw custom territories to suit your needs.

Gain additional insights by adding data such as leads, sales, and revenue to measure the performance of each territory. Use demographic insights to analyze your customer base in each region and determine the best targeting methods.

Customize your sales territory map further by adding heat maps, radii, and optimized routes to give your sales reps the best chance at success.

Create Your Own Sales Territory Plan Today

Does your business need a detailed sales territory plan? Then, sign  up for a Maptive free trial account and start mapping your territories.

Brad Crisp is the CEO at Maptive.com, based in Denver, CO and born in San Francisco, CA. He has extensive experience in Business Mapping, GIS, Data Visualization, Mapping Data Analytics and all forms of software development. His career includes Software Development and Venture Capital dating back to 1998 at businesses like Maptive, GlobalMojo (now Giving Assistant), KPG Ventures, Loopnet, NextCard, and Banking.

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Here is a free business plan sample for a fruit and vegetable store.

Have you ever envisioned owning a bustling fruit and vegetable market that serves as a cornerstone of health in your community? Wondering where to start?

Look no further, as we're about to guide you through a comprehensive business plan tailored for a fruit and vegetable market.

Creating a solid business plan is crucial for any aspiring entrepreneur. It serves as a roadmap, outlining your vision, objectives, and the strategies you'll employ to turn your fresh produce venture into a thriving business.

To jumpstart your planning process with ease and precision, feel free to utilize our fruit and vegetable market business plan template. Our team of experts is also on standby to provide a free review and fine-tuning of your plan.

How to draft a great business plan for your fruit and vegetable store?

A good business plan for a fruit and vegetable market must cater to the unique aspects of this type of retail business.

Initially, it's crucial to provide a comprehensive overview of the market landscape. This includes up-to-date statistics and an exploration of emerging trends within the industry, similar to what we've incorporated in our fruit and vegetable market business plan template .

Your business plan should articulate your vision clearly. Define your target demographic (such as local residents, restaurants, or health-conscious consumers) and establish your market's distinctive features (like offering organic produce, exotic fruits, or locally-sourced vegetables).

Market analysis is the next critical component. This requires a thorough examination of local competitors, market dynamics, and consumer buying patterns.

For a fruit and vegetable market, it's imperative to detail the range of products you intend to sell. Describe your selection of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and any additional items you plan to offer, and discuss how these choices align with the preferences and needs of your customer base.

The operational plan is equally important. It should outline the location of your market, the layout of the retail space, your supply chain for fresh produce, and inventory management practices.

Given the nature of a fruit and vegetable market, it is vital to highlight the freshness and quality of your produce, your relationships with growers and suppliers, and adherence to health and safety standards.

Then, delve into your marketing and sales strategies. How do you plan to attract and keep customers coming back? Consider your approach to promotions, customer loyalty programs, and potential value-added services (like home delivery or a juice bar).

Incorporating digital strategies, such as an online ordering system or a robust social media presence, is also crucial in the modern marketplace.

The financial section is another cornerstone of your business plan. It should encompass the initial investment, projected sales, operating expenses, and the point at which you expect to break even.

With a fruit and vegetable market, managing waste and understanding the shelf life of products are critical, so precise planning and knowledge of your financials are essential. For assistance, consider using our financial forecast for a fruit and vegetable market .

Compared to other business plans, a fruit and vegetable market plan must pay closer attention to the perishability of inventory, the importance of a robust supply chain, and the potential for seasonal fluctuations.

A well-crafted business plan not only helps you to define your strategies and vision but also plays a pivotal role in attracting investors or securing loans.

Lenders and investors are keen on a solid market analysis, realistic financial projections, and a comprehensive understanding of the day-to-day operations of a fruit and vegetable market.

By presenting a thorough and substantiated plan, you showcase your dedication and readiness for the success of your venture.

To achieve these goals while saving time, you are welcome to fill out our fruit and vegetable market business plan template .

A free example of business plan for a fruit and vegetable store

Here, we will provide a concise and illustrative example of a business plan for a specific project.

This example aims to provide an overview of the essential components of a business plan. It is important to note that this version is only a summary. As it stands, this business plan is not sufficiently developed to support a profitability strategy or convince a bank to provide financing.

To be effective, the business plan should be significantly more detailed, including up-to-date market data, more persuasive arguments, a thorough market study, a three-year action plan, as well as detailed financial tables such as a projected income statement, projected balance sheet, cash flow budget, and break-even analysis.

All these elements have been thoroughly included by our experts in the business plan template they have designed for a fruit and vegetable market .

Here, we will follow the same structure as in our business plan template.

Market Opportunity

Market data and figures.

The fruit and vegetable market is an essential and robust component of the global food industry.

Recent estimates value the global fruit and vegetable trade at over 1 trillion dollars, with expectations for continued growth as consumers seek healthier eating options. In the United States, the fruit and vegetable industry contributes significantly to the economy, with thousands of markets and stores providing a wide range of produce to meet consumer demand.

These statistics underscore the critical role that fruit and vegetable markets play in not only providing nutritious food options but also in supporting local agriculture and economies.

Current trends in the fruit and vegetable industry indicate a shift towards organic and locally sourced produce, as consumers become more health-conscious and environmentally aware.

There is an increasing demand for organic fruits and vegetables, driven by the perception of better quality and concerns about pesticides and other chemicals. The local food movement is also gaining momentum, with consumers showing a preference for produce that is grown locally to support community farmers and reduce carbon emissions associated with transportation.

Technological advancements are influencing the industry as well, with innovations in vertical farming and hydroponics allowing for more sustainable and space-efficient growing methods.

Online grocery shopping and delivery services are expanding, making it easier for consumers to access fresh produce directly from their homes.

Additionally, the push for transparency in food sourcing continues to grow, with consumers wanting to know more about where their food comes from and how it is grown.

These trends are shaping the future of the fruit and vegetable market, as businesses strive to meet the evolving preferences and values of modern consumers.

Success Factors

Several key factors contribute to the success of a fruit and vegetable market.

Quality and freshness of produce are paramount. Markets that offer a wide variety of fresh, high-quality fruits and vegetables are more likely to build and maintain a dedicated customer base.

Diversity in product offerings, including exotic or hard-to-find produce, can differentiate a market from its competitors.

Location is also vital, as markets that are easily accessible to consumers will naturally attract more foot traffic.

Customer service is another important aspect, with knowledgeable and friendly staff enhancing the shopping experience and encouraging repeat visits.

Effective cost management and the ability to adapt to changing consumer trends, such as the demand for organic and locally grown produce, are crucial for the long-term viability of a fruit and vegetable market.

The Project

Project presentation.

Our fruit and vegetable market project is designed to cater to the increasing consumer demand for fresh, organic, and locally-sourced produce. Situated in a community-focused neighborhood, our market will offer a diverse selection of fruits and vegetables, emphasizing seasonal and organic options. We will partner with local farmers and suppliers to ensure that our customers have access to the freshest produce available, supporting sustainable agricultural practices and reducing our carbon footprint.

We aim to provide not just produce, but a holistic healthy eating experience by offering a range of complementary products such as herbs, spices, and artisanal condiments. Our market will be a hub for health-conscious consumers and those interested in cooking with the finest ingredients.

Our fruit and vegetable market is set to become a cornerstone in the community, promoting healthier lifestyles and fostering connections between local producers and consumers.

Value Proposition

The value proposition of our fruit and vegetable market lies in our commitment to providing the community with the highest quality fresh produce. We understand the importance of nutrition and the role that fruits and vegetables play in maintaining a healthy diet.

Our market will offer a unique shopping experience where customers can enjoy a wide variety of produce, learn about the benefits of incorporating more fruits and vegetables into their diets, and discover new and exotic varieties. We are dedicated to creating a welcoming environment where everyone can find something to enrich their meals and support their well-being.

By focusing on local and organic sourcing, we also contribute to the sustainability of our food systems and the prosperity of local farmers, aligning our business with the values of environmental stewardship and community support.

Project Owner

The project owner is an individual with a profound passion for healthy living and community engagement. With a background in agricultural studies and experience in the food retail industry, they are well-equipped to establish a market that prioritizes quality and freshness.

They bring a wealth of knowledge about the seasonality and sourcing of produce, and are committed to creating a marketplace that reflects the diversity and richness of nature's offerings. Their dedication to health, nutrition, and sustainability drives them to build a market that not only sells fruits and vegetables but also educates and inspires the community to embrace a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle.

Their vision is to create a space where the joy of fresh, wholesome food is accessible to all, and where the market serves as a vibrant gathering place for people to connect with their food and each other.

The Market Study

Market segments.

The market segments for this fruit and vegetable market are diverse and cater to a wide range of consumers.

Firstly, there are health-conscious individuals who prioritize fresh, organic produce in their diets for wellness and nutritional benefits.

Secondly, the market serves customers who are looking for locally-sourced and seasonal produce to support community farmers and reduce their carbon footprint.

Additionally, the market attracts individuals with specific dietary needs, such as vegans, vegetarians, and those with food sensitivities who require a variety of fresh produce options.

Culinary professionals, including chefs and caterers, represent another segment, seeking high-quality ingredients to enhance their dishes.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis of the fruit and vegetable market project highlights several key factors.

Strengths include a strong focus on fresh, high-quality produce, relationships with local farmers, and a commitment to sustainability and eco-friendly practices.

Weaknesses might involve the perishable nature of inventory, the need for constant supply chain management, and potential seasonal fluctuations in product availability.

Opportunities exist in expanding the market's reach through online sales and delivery services, as well as in educating consumers about the benefits of eating fresh and local produce.

Threats could include competition from larger grocery chains with more buying power, adverse weather affecting crop yields, and potential economic downturns reducing consumer spending on premium produce.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis in the fruit and vegetable market sector indicates a varied landscape.

Direct competitors include other local markets, organic food stores, and large supermarkets with extensive produce sections.

These competitors vie for customers who value convenience, variety, and price.

Potential competitive advantages for our market include superior product freshness, strong community ties, exceptional customer service, and a focus on sustainable and ethical sourcing.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors is crucial for carving out a niche and ensuring customer loyalty.

Competitive Advantages

Our fruit and vegetable market's dedication to offering the freshest and highest quality produce sets us apart from the competition.

We provide a wide array of fruits and vegetables, including rare and exotic items, to cater to the diverse tastes and needs of our customers.

Our commitment to sustainability, through supporting local farmers and minimizing waste, resonates with environmentally conscious consumers.

We also emphasize transparency and education about the source and benefits of our produce, fostering a trusting relationship with our clientele.

You can also read our articles about: - how to open a fruit and vegetable store: a complete guide - the customer segments of a fruit and vegetable store - the competition study for a fruit and vegetable store

The Strategy

Development plan.

Our three-year development plan for the fresh fruit and vegetable market is designed to promote healthy living within the community.

In the first year, our goal is to establish a strong local presence by sourcing a wide variety of high-quality, seasonal produce and building relationships with local farmers and suppliers.

The second year will focus on expanding our reach by setting up additional market locations and possibly introducing mobile market services to access a broader customer base.

In the third year, we plan to diversify our offerings by including organic and exotic fruits and vegetables, as well as implementing educational programs on nutrition and sustainable agriculture.

Throughout this period, we will be committed to sustainability, community engagement, and providing exceptional service to ensure we become a staple in our customers' healthy lifestyles.

Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas for our fruit and vegetable market targets health-conscious consumers and those looking for fresh, local produce.

Our value proposition is centered on offering the freshest, high-quality fruits and vegetables, with a focus on local and organic options, and providing exceptional customer service.

We will sell our products through our physical market locations and consider an online ordering system for customer convenience, utilizing our key resources such as our relationships with local farmers and our knowledgeable staff.

Key activities include sourcing and curating produce, maintaining quality control, and engaging with the community.

Our revenue streams will be generated from the sales of produce, while our costs will be associated with procurement, operations, and marketing efforts.

Access a complete and editable real Business Model Canvas in our business plan template .

Marketing Strategy

Our marketing strategy is centered on community engagement and education.

We aim to highlight the health benefits of fresh produce and the environmental advantages of buying locally. Our approach includes community events, cooking demonstrations, and partnerships with local health and wellness organizations.

We will also leverage social media to showcase our daily offerings, share tips on healthy eating, and feature stories from our partner farmers.

Additionally, we plan to offer loyalty programs and seasonal promotions to encourage repeat business and attract new customers.

Risk Policy

The risk policy for our fruit and vegetable market focuses on mitigating risks associated with perishable goods, supply chain management, and market fluctuations.

We will implement strict quality control measures and develop a robust inventory management system to minimize waste and ensure product freshness.

Building strong relationships with a diverse group of suppliers will help us manage supply risks and price volatility.

We will also maintain a conservative financial strategy to manage operational costs effectively and ensure business sustainability.

Insurance coverage will be in place to protect against unforeseen events that could impact our business operations.

Why Our Project is Viable

We believe in the viability of a fruit and vegetable market that prioritizes freshness, quality, and community health.

With a growing trend towards healthy eating and local sourcing, our market is well-positioned to meet consumer demand.

We are committed to creating a shopping experience that supports local agriculture and provides educational value to our customers.

Adaptable to market trends and customer feedback, we are excited about the potential of our fruit and vegetable market to become a cornerstone of healthy living in our community.

You can also read our articles about: - the Business Model Canvas of a fruit and vegetable store - the marketing strategy for a fruit and vegetable store

The Financial Plan

Of course, the text presented below is far from sufficient to serve as a solid and credible financial analysis for a bank or potential investor. They expect specific numbers, financial statements, and charts demonstrating the profitability of your project.

All these elements are available in our business plan template for a fruit and vegetable market and our financial plan for a fruit and vegetable market .

Initial expenses for our fruit and vegetable market include costs for securing a retail space in a high-traffic area, purchasing refrigeration units and display equipment to maintain and showcase fresh produce, obtaining necessary permits and licenses, investing in a robust inventory management system, and launching marketing initiatives to attract customers to our location.

Our revenue assumptions are based on an in-depth analysis of the local market demand for fresh, high-quality fruits and vegetables, taking into account the increasing trend towards healthy eating and organic produce.

We expect sales to grow steadily as we establish our market's reputation for offering a wide variety of fresh and locally sourced produce.

The projected income statement outlines expected revenues from the sale of fruits and vegetables, cost of goods sold (including procurement, transportation, and storage), and operating expenses (rent, marketing, salaries, utilities, etc.).

This results in a forecasted net profit that is essential for assessing the long-term viability of our fruit and vegetable market.

The projected balance sheet will reflect assets such as refrigeration and display equipment, inventory of fresh produce, and liabilities including any loans and operational expenses.

It will provide a snapshot of the financial condition of our market at the end of each fiscal period.

Our projected cash flow statement will detail all cash inflows from sales and outflows for expenses, helping us to predict our financial needs and ensure we have sufficient funds to operate smoothly.

The projected financing plan will outline the sources of funding we intend to tap into to cover our initial setup costs and any additional financing needs.

The working capital requirement for our market will be carefully managed to maintain adequate liquidity for day-to-day operations, such as purchasing fresh stock, managing inventory, and covering staff wages.

The break-even analysis will determine the volume of sales we need to achieve to cover all our costs and begin generating a profit, marking the point at which our market becomes financially sustainable.

Key performance indicators we will monitor include the turnover rate of our inventory, the gross margin on produce sales, the current ratio to evaluate our ability to meet short-term obligations, and the return on investment to gauge the profitability of the capital invested in our market.

These metrics will be instrumental in assessing the financial performance and overall success of our fruit and vegetable market.

If you want to know more about the financial analysis of this type of activity, please read our article about the financial plan for a fruit and vegetable store .

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What is the MoSCoW Method?

The MoSCoW Method is a prioritization tool that helps professionals in managing their time and effort .

To do so, it proposes to classify the importance of the different characteristics of a product (or a Project) according to their importance .

Its name is an acronym of the 4 Prioritization Categories proposed (adding two “o”):

• M ust Have .
• S hould Have .
• C ould Have .
• W on’t Have .

Four Prioritization Categories

Must Have : Essential Requirements that the product or project must have.

• Critical Features without replacement.

Should Have : Important desired Requirements for the product or project.

• They can be substituted if necessary.

Could Have : Improvements to the product or project.

• There are different alternatives.

Won’t have : Characteristics agreed not to be adopted .

• No one will waste time implementing them.

Let’s see the first example:

MoSCoW Method example

Imagine that you have been hired to create a Website for a Law firm.

They want a professional Site where people can Register and, once inside, track their court cases .

Since you want to deliver the best possible Site on time, you decide to follow the MoSCoW method .

How does it look like?

Must Have :

• Solid programming without any bugs.
• A Solid Register System.
• A Safe and Reliable personal directory.

Should Have :

• A Fast Site.
• An outstanding Design.
• Notifications sent by e-mail.

Could Have :

• Custom menus.
• Suggestions.
• A Blog section with latest news.

Won’t Have :

• Paid content.
• A Public Members section.

As we usually say, this Method may seem obvious.

Then… Why is it important?

Why is the MoSCoW Method important?

Many of professionals end up wasting time , effort and resources on useless task s that are ultimately not essential at all.

Surely you have experienced this situation working in a Team:

• Everyone spends hours modifying a minor feature and, ultimately, the important thing is missing .

That is why this Method is so important:

• Because it concentrates your efforts and forces you to think about what is really important .

As you can imagine, this Tool can be employed in practically all kinds of situations.

But when do we especially recommend it?

When should you use the MoSCoW Method?

We highly recommend to use the MoSCoW Method:

• To put order and prioritization.
• To avoid wasting time with non-essential touch-ups.
• In order to meet the Essential Requirements.
• When the product can have very different characteristics.

Now, let’s see more examples:

MoSCoW Method examples

We have chosen different real examples where the MoSCoW Method can be of great help for the development of certain products.

Let’s begin:

A Wallet - MoSCoW Method example

Let’s imagine that you are developing a wallet .

As you know, wallets are very modular products.

They can have:

• Several or few departments for cards.
• Coin purse… or not.
• 1 or 2 bill slots.

There is not a canonical wallet (one that is the benchmark for all the others).

• That is why you decided to use the MoSCoW Method to develop it.

After some thoughts, you decide that your wallet:

• 2 bill slots.
• 8 compartments for credit cards.
• High resistance materials and sewing.
• Leather as its main material.
• A translucid Credit card compartment.
• A transverse horizontal compartment.
• A striking color on the inside of the bill slots.
• Completely black exterior color.
• One translucid compartment for small photos.
• A Coin purse.
• A Passport compartment.

Making a Cake - MoSCoW Method example

In this example, we’ll imagine that you are preparing a wedding Cake .

• You have a very rigid deadline (the wedding day, of course).

In addition, as you also know, Cakes can have lots of variations.

• We could say they are very modular .

That is why you decide to use the MoSCoW Method.

How does it look?

Well, your Cake:

• White coating.
• Two sugar figurines on top.
• 6 layers of sponge cake inside.
• Belgian chocolate between the layers.
• Decorations on the edges
• Sugar flowers.
• Chocolate balls.
• Scattered sugar pearls.
• Multicolor layers.
• An excessive amount of decoration.
• Fruit flavor.

Designing a Poster - MoSCoW Method example

You are now an artist hired to Design a poster for a Rock concert.

Obviously, this is a Design job with infinite variations possible.

• Also, you have a close deadline to finish it.

No need to mention that you will use the MoSCoW Method.

Finally, the Poster:

• The name of the Main rock band, very prominent.
• Images and colors that best suit their style.
• A typeface that best suits the musical style.
• An illustration related to Rock in the middle.
• The name of the rest of the bands that will play.
• Where and when it will take place.
• Where you can buy the tickets.
• Nearby metro and bus stations.
• The name of the city.
• The maximum capacity of the stadium
• At what time each band will play.

Summarizing

The MoSCoW Method is a prioritization tool that helps professionals in managing their time and effort.

It proposes to classify the importance of the different characteristics of a product in 4 Categories :

• M ust Have.
• S hould Have.
• C ould Have.
• W on’t Have.

Although this Method can be used in all kinds of situations, we highly recommend to use it:

• When working in a team .
• In Design tasks .
• When there is a close deadline .
• With modular products or projects .
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MoSCoW Matrix Template

Use the MoSCow Method to efficiently place deliverables in a matrix to understand their importance to your team’s projects.

About the MoSCoW Matrix Template

When you’re working on a project with a lot of deliverables, it can be difficult to track priorities. And as deadlines approach, sometimes priorities can shift, further complicating your workflow. How can you keep track of evolving priorities and still focus on a complex project? 

What is the MoSCoW method?

The MoSCoW method is a powerful technique for tracking priorities, which are categorized and placed in a matrix model. Project managers, product developers, and business analysts use the matrix to align their teams when working through a set of project deliverables. Teams collaborate with stakeholders to analyze and rank the importance of deliverables with MoSCoW, making it easier to stay on track. 

MoSCoW is an acronym for Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have. These four priority categories make up the four segments in the matrix. “Must Have” items are necessary for delivery; “Should Have” items are important but not necessary; “Could Have” items are nice to have (they are not priorities, but your team can work on them if time and resources permit); and “Won’t Have” items do not fit into the scope of the current project. To use MoSCoW, you create four category segments showing your current priorities and their status (Complete, In Progress, or Not Yet Started). 

When to use the MoSCoW method

The MoSCoW method is useful whenever you need to present business needs to an audience, assess priorities, and collaborate on impending deliverables with a group of stakeholders. By drawing and updating the matrix, you can get a snapshot of your priorities and their impact at each stage of a project. MoSCoW allows everyone on your team to easily grasp upcoming tasks and their impact on your timeline.

Create your own MoSCoW matrix

Making your own MoSCoW matrix is easy. Miro comes with the perfect canvas to create and share it. Get started by selecting the MoSCoW matrix template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

Fill in your must-haves.  The MoSCoW matrix is divided into four categories. The first is Must Haves, the items that are necessary for completion of your project. If you’re unsure whether a task is a Must-have, ask yourself the following questions: If you do not complete this task, will your product or service work as intended? Can you still deliver the product without this item? Does this task allow you to fulfill all legal requirements for your project? Will your product or service be safe without it? Will your customer suffer consequences if you fail to complete this task?

Fill in your should-haves.  Next, move on to the items that are not necessary to complete your project but are still important for success. Remember, the items in this category are not  vital , but you should try and incorporate them into your timeline anyway. If you’re unsure, ask yourself: Although it might be painful not to complete this task, could you still ship the product without it? Can you use a workaround to avoid this task?

Fill in your could-haves.  Many teams colloquially refer to these items as “nice-to-haves.” While they might make the service run more smoothly or make your product look better, these tasks are not important. If you have the time or resources to complete them at the end, then you can do so. If not, you can plan to do them later. To fill out this part of the matrix, ask yourself the following questions: What are the benefits of these tasks? Do they outweigh the costs? How will these tasks impact our timeline? Can we still complete the project on time and within budget if we include these tasks?

Fill out your won’t-haves.  These items are outside the scope of your current project. Maybe you don’t have the budget to complete them, or maybe they don’t fit into your timeline. If you’re not quite sure whether something is a Won’t Have, ask yourself: How does this item impact our budget? Does our team have the bandwidth to complete this task? Will this item have a tangible impact on our customers? No one likes to admit that they can’t complete something, but don’t think of Won’t Haves as failures; they’re projects for another day.

How do you use the MoSCow template?

The MoSCoW acronym (excluding the o's) is carved with the first letters of the priority categories it works with. These are Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves and Won't-haves. And that's how you can define which task falls into which category.

What are the benefits of using the MoSCow method?

The key benefits of the MoSCoW technique are that it's quick and easy to use. The technique is good for highlighting the priorities of projects that are in progress and for organizing efficient time management.

Get started with this template right now.

How Now Wow Matrix Template

Works best for:.

Ideation, Product Management, Prioritization

There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm — but some are more original and easier to implement. The How Now Wow matrix is a tool that helps you identify and organize those great ideas, as well as reinvigorates your team to think creatively and take risks (a taller order as you scale). Grab this template to create your own matrix, then rank the ideas you generated in a brainstorm as “How” (difficult to implement), “Now” (easy to implement), or “Wow” (both original and easy to implement).

Data Org Chart

Org Charts, Operations, Mapping

The Data Org Chart template provides a visual representation of data-related roles and relationships within an organization. By mapping out data management responsibilities and dependencies, teams can enhance data governance and improve collaboration. With features for customizing data roles and connections, this template empowers teams to optimize data processes and ensure data integrity and compliance.

Research Topic Brainstorm Template

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Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.

Milestone Chart Template

Project Management, Strategic Planning, Project Planning

When your team is collaborating on a large project, keeping track of the many tasks and multiple timelines can be a challenge. That’s why you need a milestone chart. These visual representations of important project events will make it simple for your team to stay on schedule and reach goals on time. And it’s so easy to get started — just determine the major milestones, use our template to create a milestone chart, and define the key dates and deliverables each milestone will require.

PESTLE Analysis Template

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Want to keep your company secure and performing soundly? You have to first know how you’ll be affected by outside elements and factors — especially those that are political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental in nature. A PESTLE Analysis helps you identify them and prepare for them. With this easy-to-use template, you can conduct a PESTLE Analysis, then use the results to shape your strategic planning, budget allocation, marketing, product updates, and organizational change initiatives.

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Encourage team members to show their appreciation for each other using Miro’s free Love Bomb Icebreaker Template. Participants can add words or phrases that show what they appreciate about their colleagues.

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Business Analysis Blog

How to do a MoSCoW Analysis and prioritise requirements in a complex environment?

How to do a MoSCoW Analysis and prioritise requirements effectively in a complex environment?

As a Business Analyst, the question of how to prioritise requirements may seem like an easy question to answer but it can also be wrought with a variety of complications and interesting complexities. Once you have overcome these potential complexities which can come with requirements prioritisation, the most relevant Business Analysis technique to apply is what is known as the MoSCoW Analysis.

This blog article will cover both how to apply the MoSCoW Analysis for requirements prioritisation as well as the considerations and complexities for a Business Analyst to understand about their environment before attempting to prioritise requirements.

So let’s start by talking about some of these complexities that can face a Business Analyst when it comes to requirements prioritisation.

#1: Different perspectives on what is important

#2: Lack of leadership

This factor walks hand in hand with the previous factor (and is most likely the cause of it!) where people have different perspectives on what takes priority. A lack of leadership in the project or initiative team causes confusion around what is important and this is when people will end up providing their own perspective around priorities rather than following business priorities or guidelines. This causes problems in various ways and can put the Business Analyst in a very awkward position. Sometimes this lack of leadership can mean that a stronger or more senior stakeholder might get the requirements prioritised according to his/her team’s preferences due to his/her position and level of influence in the organisation rather than it being the true priorities for the good of the organisation. This leads to requirement priorities which is not necessarily being implemented in the most valuable or efficient manner and consequently reflects badly on the project as a whole.

It is imperative for a Business Analyst to receive clear direction from their project manager or project steering committee about what are the clear business objectives (with their relative priorities outlined) that requirements must deliver against so that the Business Analyst can use these business objective priorities to guide the conversations when requirement prioritisation activities take place.

#3: Not prioritising requirements

In some organisations or projects there is simply no formal and explicit effort undertaken to prioritise requirements at all. This doesn’t mean requirements are not in some sort of priority, it simply means that the requirements are not prioritised in a structured and collaborative way. This type of approach can cause problems when expectations are not managed about what will be delivered by when but it can also be that prioritising the requirements are very clear cut in a particular type of project and hence this informal way works in those circumstances. So although the Business Analyst must be very careful when choosing to not formally go through a requirements prioritisation activity, it can be the most logical and suitable approach for certain types of projects.

#4: Priority levels are not well defined

The last complexity or consideration for the Business Analyst to pay careful attention to before embarking on requirements prioritisation activities are simply the definition of the priority levels and what each priority means. Many organisations have adopted a method or set of priority levels which they are used to using without it necessarily being the most effective way to prioritise.

So now that we have discussed some of the common complexities in projects and organisations that make requirements prioritisation somewhat tricky for the Business Analyst lets now look at the MoSCoW Analysis technique and how best it can be applied.

The MoSCoW Analysis Technique

The MoSCoW Analysis is a very common and effective requirements prioritisation technique because it allows not only for three clear priority levels but also covers the requirements that will end up not being included in the currently delivery or project at all. This works very well because it allows people to explicitly agree the different priorities including the requirements, which will be excluded or referred to a future release.

Let’s have a look at how this prioritization technique works:

MoSCoW is an acronym.

M = Must ‘Must’ level requirements are those requirements which will definitely be included to be delivered. There is no negotiation around whether they will be delivered and are considered mandatory requirements.

S = Should ‘Should’ level requirements are those requirements which should be included if at all possible. If the project have capacity and time and it will not jeopardise any of the “Must” requirements, then these requirements should be delivered or included in whatever the prioritisation is done for.

C = Could The ‘Could’ level requirements are the requirements which could be included if it doesn’t have any impact on any of the ‘Should’ or ‘Must’ requirements.

W = Won’t The ‘Won’t’ level requirements tend to be the requirements which will not be included to be delivered or implemented this time but are requirements that would be favoured for a future delivery or implementation.

In Conclusion

As a final point to make, it is important that although the Business Analyst uses a best practice requirements technique , the outlined complexities listed here should be addressed as much as possible prior to embarking on a requirements prioritization activity to ensure a successful and accurate outcome.

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