Your CRM is designed to manage transactions—not to plan a dynamic Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. While it forms the backbone of your SalesOps, a CRM lacks the tools and flexibility needed for thoughtful and strategic planning. Territory management is a crucial part of this planning, particularly when preparing for the next fiscal year. The foundation for any strong sales strategy is territory carving—the process of allocating resources, sales reps, and support functions to the right accounts, segments, and geographies.
Effective territory management goes beyond simple resource distribution. It involves two key phases: territory carving and runtime territory management. Both must be aligned with the company’s corporate strategy and flexible enough to adjust as business conditions evolve.
If you lead a sales organization, you likely started out “carrying a bag.” You may think it best to create territory assignments the same way your mentors did “back in the day.” The problem is that those methods are outdated now that sophisticated tools have transformed SalesOps and RevOps. Territory management in today’s competitive and uncertain market has to be more efficient, optimized and dynamic. There are two phases to territory management.
The first is territory carving, the assignment of resources to territories. The second phase is runtime territory management – territories must be able to seamlessly adapt to change throughout the year.
Let’s look at these two phases in greater detail and discuss six techniques that will boost efficiency and sales productivity.
Phase 1: Territory Carving – Assigning Resources to Opportunities
Territory carving is about strategically assigning sales reps, engineers, customer success teams, and operations to the right accounts. Poorly managed territory creation, driven by individual rep preferences, often results in inefficiency and gerrymandered districts. Territory carving should be optimized, balanced, and aligned with corporate goals.
1. Define Your Corporate Goals
Has your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) evolved? Are there new products, segments, or geographies to target? Territory assignments should reflect these changes. Use data-driven insights to map territories based on emerging opportunities and current market dynamics.
Territory assignments are not only about sales reps. It’s essential to look at the team cross-functionally. Do the territories have the right mix of presales, customer success, sales engineers and ops? If there are experts in specific verticals, the plan should keep them aligned with their target market.
2. Carve Using Multiple Factors
Effective territory planning takes multiple factors into account:
- Employee count
- Geography
- Industry/vertical
- Global/named accounts
- Propensity to buy
- Overcarving (see below)
Overcarving means creating extra territories in anticipation of future growth. If the company plans to expand its sales force by the end of the year, territory assignments may “over carve” to leave space for incoming reps. This approach ensures smooth transitions as teams grow, and ensures that sales reps are fairly compensated even for temporarily assigned accounts.
3. Balance Territories for Maximum Productivity
Territories should be balanced to optimize sales productivity. A data-driven model that scores accounts based on activity, contact history, and lead generation can ensure territories are fair and strategically sound. For example, an account that recently expanded its workforce might need to be moved from a small business to a major account territory.
Achieving rapid buy-in is critical. When sales reps understand that their quotas are assigned based on a transparent, data-driven model, they are more likely to accept the plan and get to work faster. Data-backed quota assignments build trust and minimize contentious discussions.
A good territory plan achieves rapid buy-in. The goal is to cut down on the time it takes for the sales organization to understand the new plan and get to work. Many sales organizations spend one or two quarters on meetings, discussions, and chaotic horse trading before the territory plan is finalized. Worse, they are doing this in Q4 when they should be focused on driving toward the year-end target. A good plan eliminates these inefficiencies and distractions through transparency and data-driven design.
Phase 2: Runtime Territory Management – Adapting to Change
Once territories are carved, the runtime management phase begins. Markets, personnel, and strategies are dynamic, and territory management must adapt accordingly throughout the year. A territory plan is only as effective as its ability to evolve with these changes. Here’s how:
1. Plan for Change
Changes in business conditions should be seamlessly integrated into your territory management plan. Automation is crucial here. Territory updates should happen quickly and smoothly without waiting for manual approval processes that can delay decision-making and harm sales performance.
A point of frustration for sales team leaders is the inability to make changes in response to the reality on the ground. Sales managers often decide fairly quickly what territory changes need to be made. They put the request into sales operations, but the change takes weeks or months to go through multiple levels of approval. A four-week delay in the context of a monthly or quarterly commission check is a huge chunk of time. Time wasted waiting for CRM updates takes food off the table of the sales team. It’s critical to support sales workflows with automation so sales managers can change course decisively and immediately get back to the business of selling.
A territory management platform allows sales managers to make real-time adjustments without bottlenecks. This flexibility helps sales teams stay agile and responsive to new opportunities and unexpected challenges.
2. Eliminate Drag
Runtime territory management is not only about account assignments. Territories are the foundations for a range of workflows that must operate smoothly to keep the sales engine firing on all cylinders.
“Drag” refers to the friction caused by misaligned workflows across different systems, like CRM, marketing automation, or customer support. For example, if leads are mistakenly routed to the wrong sales rep, it can cause confusion and lost opportunities.
To keep the sales machine operating at 100% efficiency, ops must execute all of these changes flawlessly. Imagine that the lead flow is updated incorrectly and leads are flowing to the wrong sales reps. It takes time for the reps to notice. Hot opportunities seek solutions elsewhere. Requests to fix the lead system are queued to the sales operations backlog.
In the meantime, the business is losing revenue, and sales reps are banging into each other in accounts. Sales managers may press operations to move more quickly, but cutting corners increases errors.
In some situations, desperate sales managers update SalesOps systems themselves. Now we have people managers doing sales operations when they should be focused on coaching sales teams. Effective runtime territory management ensures that account assignments align with lead routing, case management, and other operational systems. Automation streamlines these processes, so the sales team can focus on selling rather than fixing broken systems.
3. Optimize for Long-Term ROI
One challenge for managers is balancing short-term and long-term priorities. Reps with a short-term focus may abandon strategic accounts that require long-term nurturing. While short-term sales goals are important, territory management should also support long-term growth. A strong territory management system will highlight when reps may be neglecting strategic accounts that require nurturing over the long term. It also helps score account activity so managers can see at a glance if their reps are following the GTM plan.
By scoring account activity and tracking GTM progress, managers can ensure that reps are working on the right accounts and adhering to the company’s long-term strategy.
Automation: Backing Your Territory Management with Technology
Territory carving and runtime territory management rely heavily on automation and data-backed insights. To stay competitive, sales operations need to leverage sophisticated software that simplifies these processes and allows for agile decision-making.
The Power of Smart Territory Management
Effective territory management is critical for building an optimized sales organization that can quickly adapt to market shifts. By following best practices for territory carving and runtime management, and backing your processes with automation, you can improve sales productivity and maximize long-term ROI. The right territory management platform will ensure that both phases work seamlessly together, enabling your sales team to hit their targets year after year.
Ready to optimize your territory management process? Learn more about how Fullcast’s GTM Planning Platform can help streamline territory carving and runtime management and empower your sales organization to succeed.
