4 Ways to Eliminate Gut-Instinct Decision-Making in Territory Planning

When it comes to making consequential business decisions, companies shouldn’t rely on their own instincts. Organizations that use hard data to drive decision-making are 19 times more likely to be profitable than businesses that make decisions based on intuition, according to Data Ideology industry research. 

Unfortunately, ending reliance on gut instinct is a tough sell for many business leaders. Most leaders have learned to trust their instincts to get to where they are. Thus, they often struggle to abandon these instincts entirely in favor of data-driven decision-making.

Read: 4 Ways To Put Your Customers at the Center of Territory Planning

A critically important use case for data-driven decisions is sales territory planning. Although businesses have traditionally relied on intuition for territory planning, intuition is no match for the power of hard data. Today, the most effective territory planning relies on powerful RevOps platforms that take in massive amounts of sales and revenue data and then integrate and analyze this data to identify patterns and trends that inform territory planning decisions. Moreover, a RevOps platform can analyze this data continuously—a contrast to any individual business leader, who won’t have the time or bandwidth to manage RevOps data on an ongoing basis. 

Let’s explore four key strategies for keeping gut-instinct decision-making out of territory planning:

1. Move away from simple, legacy ways of planning 

Businesses traditionally use very simplistic geographic boundaries as the basis for territory planning decisions. The problem is that companies don’t need data to drive this planning process, which means businesses also become free to make territory assignments using instinct, whim and personal preference. 

Read: 4 Territory Planning Strategies to Avoid the Sales Ops Mindset

By contrast, businesses that start collecting and analyzing sales and revenue data are likely to follow a more deliberative, strategic process to set territory assignments. The reason is that when businesses are reviewing data related to sales leads, marketing, customer interactions, customer service, product development, and industry verticals, they’ll likely realize it doesn’t make sense to rely exclusively on intuition. Thus, access to relevant, actionable data becomes a catalyst for moving away from traditional territory planning processes and instead embracing data-driven territory planning.

2. Convert territory planning into an ongoing, data-dependent activity 

Traditional territory planning is only done once a year, and it’s often for the simple reason that once a year is all the organization can handle. Territory planning is time-consuming, politically contentious, and frequently tense and disappointing. Modern RevOps technology, by contrast, makes it feasible to engage in territory planning year-round—and to lessen stress levels. 

By collecting and analyzing continuous streams of real-time data, businesses realize that hard data removes perceptions of unfairness and makes the organization better positioned to respond swiftly to changing market conditions, new opportunities, and sudden and unexpected challenges.

3. Reject projections and forecasts that aren’t based on hard data 

The most aggressive, direct way to stop relying on gut-instinct decision-making is to keep RevOps leaders from getting away with it. When RevOps projections and forecasts are presented that don’t effectively utilize high-quality RevOps data, the organization can create an expectation that these analyses will be rejected outright. Such an organizational culture change can be a tough pill to swallow initially, and it may not be suitable for every organization. But when members of the C-suite decide to start self-policing themselves and those around them, desired behavioral changes tend to come fast—and are likely to stick around for good.

4. Automate, consolidate and streamline as much as possible 

High-quality RevOps data is more than just sales data. It also comes from marketing, customer experience, customer service, product development, and business development. The team tends to silo this data. Thus, it’s critical to break down team siloes proactively and to centralize access to all of these data sets readily from a collaborative RevOps platform. The best RevOps platforms can automate, consolidate, and streamline a wide range of disparate data sets. The result is teams can easily find all the data they’re looking for, making them much more likely to use data—not their own instincts—to drive territory planning decisions.

Data-driven decision-making should be a long-term goal of every business. And sales territory planning can serve as a particularly effective way to help companies to realize this goal. Through territory planning, businesses can keep gut instincts out of decision-making. 

Effective ways to work toward this change include abandoning reliance on legacy ways of doing territory planning, converting territory planning into an ongoing activity, rejecting projections and forecasts that aren’t based on hard data, and automating, consolidating, and streamlining as much as possible. 

To help businesses fully integrate RevOps data into territory planning, Fullcast offers the industry-leading RevOps Go-to-Market Cloud platform. This comprehensive platform integrates data from teams across the organization, providing the entire organization with a single, unified, collaborative space for collecting, sharing, and analyzing RevOps data. To learn more about how Fullcast helps organizations use their RevOps data to optimize territory planning, please visit https://www.fullcast.com/product/plan-collaborate/.