Optimizing efficiency should be one of your priorities throughout your entire sales strategy, but it’s especially important when it comes to sales territories. Sales territory management is one of the most important factors in any business’s success. Even if your sales territory management is already set up and functional, there’s always room for improvement. In fact, you’ll need to make a continuous effort to improve in order to stay as competitive as possible. Here are three ways you can maximize sales territory efficiency.
Account for Time
Time is the one factor none of us can change no matter what we do. Time always passes at the same rate, and every day of the week contains the same amount of minutes and hours. That’s why you’ll need to frame each aspect of your sales territory efforts in terms of time. Consider how long it takes to drive from one area to another. Think about how long it takes to meet with prospects and how long it will take to do the paperwork.
One of the biggest time wasters in sales is a lead that goes nowhere. You’ll want to make sure you have quality leads, or else you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time that could be used moving another sale forward. You’ll also need to consider how long each lead will take to fulfill. With that in mind, scheduling meetings according to territories is much more efficient, as you can plan to meet with more clients within your given time frame.
Rate Your Leads
While time is certainly an important factor, you also need to consider how much revenue you’ll get out of each client. This is also a useful way to organize your territories if you want to draw in as much as possible from each one. To begin, you may want to start by rating your clients and leads based on how much revenue they’ll bring in and how easy it will be to get. Your top clients will be those who are pretty easy in terms of effort required and who provide good revenue. Medium-level clients will be those who are a bit more difficult and unpredictable but still produce decent revenue. Low-level clients are those who are riskier, and given the time requirements, may not even be worth it.
Making the most of your leads also means prioritizing your accounts. Your main focus should be on maintaining larger clients you already have rather than new clients or smaller clients. That means territories with larger clients are the ones you’ll want to spend the most time on. To be clear, that doesn’t mean solely focusing on what will get you the most revenue in the short term. The value of leads and accounts lies in how much future growth they can offer.
Review Your Territories
To best maximize your sales territory efficiency, you’ll need to conduct regular reviews. Several mapping and analytics tools are available for just that, letting you visualize how your efforts are playing out in a way that’s easy to understand. For example, you can follow when certain clients need your services most over a given time period. With that information, you can prioritize your sales territory efforts in a different direction when those clients’ needs are lower, while still allocating time to them when their needs do arise.
When you’re looking over your territories, don’t fall into the trap of focusing on small, insignificant details that will get you off track. Instead, view your territories in the context of your larger, long-term plans. Having those long-term, set plans and goals in place gives you a basis to measure against when analyzing how well your sales territory efficiency efforts are going.
Get the Most Out of Your Territories
These handy ways to improve your sales territory efficiency are just the beginning of getting the most out of your efforts. Contact us at Sales Arbiter to take your sales to the next level. We can guide you in strategizing how to get the most out of your sales territories, and build a sales team you can rely on.
