Annual planning is right around the corner for most organizations. As you prepare to revisit account plans, sales territories, and other activities, now is the time to reflect on your company’s performance and set new goals and expectations for the coming year. With the current macroeconomic climate, organizations need to build pipeline and grow revenue at an accelerated pace, despite continuously being asked to do more with less.
So where do you start?
With a plan. Whether you’re given new growth targets, a change in strategy, need to improve rep productivity – or all of the above – having a well-defined, data-driven plan will enable you to achieve these goals.
One of the key undertakings during the planning process is the design of sales territories.
It may not be obvious, but territory design plays a critical role in a rep’s ability to achieve their pipeline and revenue goals. If they have too many accounts, they lose focus or get overwhelmed. Too few accounts, they think they aren’t being set up for success and want more. So, how do you find the right balance without relying on anecdotal feedback, emotions, or gut instincts?
Modernized organizations take a data-driven approach and layer in account engagement data to optimize and design sales territories. They know that poorly designed territories often result in lower-than-expected growth and revenue due to lack of engagement and support across key accounts.
Conversely, when done the right way, territory designs can help bring in more deals and dollars. According to Harvard Business Review, companies get between a 2 and 7 percent lift in revenue from effective territory planning.
It’s all in the data – so when designing sales territories for the next fiscal year, make sure you’re taking it into consideration. Here are three key factors to help shape your efforts.
Ensure your reps have adequately penetrated and engaged their existing accounts by assessing sales activity trends. Using account- and contact-level engagement scores and comparing activities against benchmarks of your top performers can help. This way, frontline managers can help coach their team on how to move the needle, as well as reallocate resources in cases where reps have too many priority accounts assigned to them.
Take your reliance on anecdotal feedback, emotions, and gut instincts and throw it out the door. With access to enterprise sales productivity data, sales leadership can now understand how critical resources are spending their time based on cold-hard facts, not stories or opinions. Armed with these metrics, sales leaders and frontline managers can make more informed decisions on how to rebalance accounts and optimize the use of their salesforce.
By optimizing sales resource allocation – sales, pre-sales, marketing, etc. – companies can optimize account coverage, ultimately resulting in an increased sales capacity. With the combination of high-quality engagement data across all of your GTM teams, you can allocate resources more accurately to engage all of your high-TAM accounts.
Annual planning season is almost here for many of us. Wouldn’t it be great to have more confidence in how you design sales territories by making decisions based on actual data – not hunches and guesswork?
People.ai can help you make more informed, effective decisions that are more equitable for all sales resources. We can also equip your teams moving forward with automation and AI-driven insights that help you course-correct on strategic account plans and other critical activities throughout the next fiscal year and beyond.
Download our workbook that provides prescriptive guidance and customer insights on how to design sales territories, strategic account plans, and other activities that pave your path to success.
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