Sales territory modeling: cool customer tips for taking a data-driven approach

One of the main challenges for Sales Ops is sales territory modeling—designing and maintaining a well-balanced sales territory so that you can maximize your sales team’s productivity. If you starve a sales rep in terms of pipeline, he’s more likely to underperform, not to mention all the complains and excuses you’ll hear. If you overload a sales rep with too big of a pipeline, she’ll have some otherwise good opportunities fall through the cracks. Either scenario is suboptimal for the company.

Most companies use a target account list or a raw company count to design sales territories. This method of using essentially the “Total Addressable Market” or “TAM” to design sales territories is problematic as it assumes your prospects are evenly distributed geographically. Even for companies as large as Oracle and Microsoft, this assumption doesn’t hold up, especially for the current-year pipeline. The actual makeup of your current pipeline and effectiveness of your local lead generation teams rarely mirrors the ideal distribution used to build the model. This inevitably end up with starving and overloaded sales reps.

One of Openprise’s customers found a better solution to do sales territory modeling by using the actual lead database in their CRM.

One of the key uses of Openprise is various types of sales routing and assignment for CRM data. This includes:

• Route leads and contacts
• Route deal registrations
• Assign accounts
• Assign users

Unlike other solutions that run in your CRM, Openprise performs these logical operations within the Openprise Cloud platform, then updates the CRM with the final assignments. The routing model is usually set up and managed from a simple spreadsheet that can be easily updated when the sales team goes through changes. This is a very unique and highly manageable approach to automate processes like lead routing.

By simply cloning the routing automation setup and creating different territory models in different spreadsheets, the sales ops team can run simulations with actual CRM data to see which model produces the optimal distribution of current pipeline among the sales reps. Openprise’s built-in analytics makes analyzing the model’s output quick and simple. The chosen spreadsheet model can then be used to drive production routing processes whenever the new territory model is to take effect. There’s no guessing, no assumptions, and no wishful thinking, just a pure data-driven approach to a sales territory model.

Want to find out more about how to do this data-driven approach to sales territory modeling? Contact Openprise to learn more.