For a business to make more sales, it must have an effective territory plan. No exemption, no excuses, or else your marketing campaign will be total confusion and a waste of time. As a business leader, define your territories and create a strategic sales plan with specific targets. Doing so will increase sales, as well as steer your business into the right path.
In this article, we will discuss five plans about how to create an effective sales territory plan. So read on and learn how to get strategic and increase your sales.
1. Understand your Sales Territory Plan
When creating a sale territory plan, you need to do it strategically. For example, start by defining your market, analyzing, and surveying existing customers. Then segment customers based on categories such as industry, location, and sale history. With this information, it will be easier to identify prospects to approach, new leads to pursue, and keep existing customers.
2. SWOT Analyse your Business
This means evaluating the market position of your business using the SWOT analysis method. Whether the business is starting up or existing, it doesn’t matter. It would help if you did a SWOT analysis to come up with a better strategy. Plus, it will help define strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the company and the ones you’re likely to face.
With this information, you will know what to focus on and grow your business. These will include the strengths that make you excel and how to build on them. Your weakness and how the sales team needs to improve and become competitive. Also, you will need to jump on the opportunities that give a competitive edge.
Opportunities can be new technology or new markets that might strengthen your business. The other thing is threats that are likely to harm your business. But more importantly, a SWOT analysis helps see faults in your business that need improvements.
3. Invest in Essential Tools
For a sales plan to be effective and successful, you will need software and communication tools.
With Softwares, you will map your sales territory plan with images and graphs or in rows and columns. Office software will be good for the job. Yet, if your sales team travels or works remotely, a traditional office phone won’t be of much help. As a result, they will miss key features that are helpful to sales teams.
That’s why investing in a cloud-based phone system from EveryDay Voip enables you to receive and make calls and send instant messages over the internet. Meaning, the sales team can make calls from laptops and phones without using personal numbers. Plus, you can use the same phone system to host video conferences and meetings between you and your sales team.
4. Get all the Data Insights you Need
Data is key in any strategic planning, leave alone sale territory. As a business, you need to gather all internal and external data and draft a sales territory plan. Furthermore, it gives you a plan backed with facts and one that gives your sales team the strongest opportunity to succeed. And in most cases, companies that use data to create their sale territory plan end up making 30 percent more than the actual sales target.
But when it comes to data, you need to incorporate three insights to have a fair and balanced sales territory plan. These include internal data (from CRM, ERP, or spreadsheets), geospatial data, and market data, which you can source from third parties.
5. Continuously Monitor your Plan
Creating a plan is not the end of things. You need to monitor performance and analyze it continuously. This gives you a deeper view of how the plan is performing within the territory. And if the performance isn’t good, you can make changes and fix the problem. This proactive action keeps territories optimized, and performance maximized for better ROI.
Conclusion
Whether a business is large or small, defining territories gives a better understanding of the market. If you properly implement the plan, your business stands to benefit from increased sales. It only needs collaboration between you and your sales team. And before you know it, you will have built a successful foundation for the sales team to exploit.
