As a successful sales rep, you understand that covering all of your territory is critical to hitting your number. When your manager gives you your book of accounts, the first thing you need to do is set up a plan for success that gives you not only full coverage of your territory, but meaningful coverage – not cringe-worthy, spammy e-blasts that get deleted instantly. There’s a big difference.
Regular, adequate coverage might consist of a few automated emails or bland, scripted calls but you haven’t achieved your success by just being adequate. You want specificity and granularity that keys in on exactly what your prospects need, when they need it, and how they want it. You want a killer plan that makes all your prospects feel like they’re your very top priority so they look forward to engaging with you and come to like doing business with you.
There are two levers to pull in this process:
Once you know how to nail these two ideas, you’ll be sailing towards optimal territory coverage.
Once you have all this information – and if you need help doing the digging, sites like DataFox and Crunchbase are great places to find that kind of stuff – you’ll want to plot out your timing. Look at your capacity, your pipeline, and the numbers you need to hit. Decide exactly when you would want to close a deal with each of your prospects so you know when to ramp up your effort.
If this seems like a straightforward instruction, that’s because it is. Great territory coverage is as simple as building a rock-solid plan and then sticking to it. Sticking to it is really where sales reps drop the ball most often.
Contact acquisition is the first stage of executing your plan. Once you’ve got your roster from your territory plan, including names of potential contacts, you need to begin breaking down exactly which personas you’re going to reach out to.
Based on how you’ve prioritized your list, rank your prospects into four tiers, each of which is approached differently: focus, farm, backburner and nurture.
This segmentation helps you to distinguish whether a client is a priority now, or if you’re doing maintenance for a future sale.
Once your accounts are in hunt/farm/nurture buckets, set up a contact plan for each respective tier. We recommend outreach methods like the AGOGE sequence – named for an ancient Spartan training technique – where you build a pre-planned, detailed and staggered sequence for your hunting stages. Or, use 50-day nurture campaigns to keep regular contact with existing or lower-priority prospects. There are templates aplenty online for setting up a touchpoint schedule and channel plan, but never hesitate to tailor it based on your insight and knowledge about specific clients.
These sorts of plans are proven prospecting techniques that help you determine and capitalize on an ideal mix of high quality prospecting activities.
Everyone’s mix is different.
For some, an automated email. For others, a more detailed schedule of personalized emails, calls and smaller automated touchpoints.
This isn’t complicated – it’s simply a set of proven methods for keeping engaged with your accounts when you’re running at full capacity and looking for new open opportunities.
Create a manageable plan for yourself that you are comfortable with and can measure to foster meaningful regular contacts with your book of business. Do this and you’ll cover your territory like a pro without breaking a sweat. (Except for sweat from fist pumps after closing so many deals.)
Pro-tip: align your periods of heavy activity with times like annual planning cycles, when budgets are being set and milestones planned out.
And hey: you could even set up a PeopleGlass sheet to include all these nuggets so you’ve got a one-stop shop for all your territory plan data.
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