Introduction
As a sales leader, it is always your top priority to figure out ways to boost your company’s sales. There are certain techniques and tricks that you might already have some idea of. However, there is one secret weapon that is often overlooked, known as area mapping in sales. Once you begin to acquire knowledge regarding the profits of territory or area mapping in sales, you will surely have thought twice before ignoring this concept.
Let’s dig down into area mapping in sales starting with a general example. Imagine you are playing a game of chess with a friend. You are relaxed and are confidently playing the match as your friend is, even for you regarding chess skills.
However, someone ties a blindfold on you and from now on, you are unable to see the board and pieces while your opponent can. Guess who’s going to win now? The opponent possesses the capacity to visualize while you do not. This surely means that you are going to lose this game and your opponent will win due to its visualization capacity.
You can acquire the same ability of visualization in the world of sales by this rich technique: territory or area mapping. If you have not yet benefited from territory mapping in sales, you are surely leaving loads of money on the table. If your opponents have mapped out all of their sales data while you are still stuck on your dreaded spreadsheets, your example is the same as the blindfolded chess player.
However, the good news is that you can still take that blindfold off of yourself and your employees and start reaping benefits from area mapping. This is a winning strategy that you can still implement in your business to close more sales and give a tough time to your competitors.
This article will educate you about everything you need to know about area mapping in sales, from why sales territory mapping to how to get started with sales territory mapping to boost your sales.
What is Sales Territory Mapping
Sales territory mapping, generally, refers to creating a map and then pointing geographic areas on it that you can assign your sales reps to cover. An area map will assist you and your team to determine your sales targets along with your resources. You can create strategies to reach these sales targets or objectives.
Sales territory mapping is a form of location intelligence that will enable you to easily visualize where your prospects and customers are located. In addition to this, an interactive sales map will also point out the distribution of customers and prospects across target areas and will also demonstrate how these target areas are distributed across your sales reps.
With the help of a lucid sales map, your team will have a certain idea on which sales reps are assigned to cover specific prospects and customers. Without it, your team will be blindly doing their job without any specific direction on what to do and when to do it.
Why Sales Territory Mapping
Area mapping in sales will enable you to unleash new opportunities. For instance, when you are leading a sizable sales team, you might certainly assume that coverage is not going to be an issue. However, when you analyze the map a bit, you will come across certain gaps and overlaps that might be affecting your sales performance. If you manage to fix these anomalies, you are guaranteed to reduce expenses, let alone closing more deals.
Territory mapping technique will allow you to visualize your sales team along with their respective territories conveniently on an interactive sales map. You can use different colours on the map to distinguish the areas and team members. This will also help in instantly identifying gaps and overlaps.
Furthermore, you can use bubble maps, radius maps, and heat maps to analyze your sales setup. These sorts of maps answer a variety of queries that assist in increasing sales and lowering expenses.
Without sales territory mapping, your sales reps won’t have a clear direction on determining which prospects and customers they should visit and when to visit. This will ultimately lead to a waste of time and valuable resources.
According to a study conducted by Salesforce, sales representatives spend an average of 64% of their time on routine tasks with spending only 36% on actually selling. With some powerful strategies and automation tools along with territory mapping, you can shift those numbers slightly and get the percentage for actual selling higher than the average percentage conducted by such studies.
Steps to Map Sales Territories Effectively
Once you understand how effective area mapping is in sales, the next step is to make a start. You might be wondering how to begin the process and start gaining the benefits of this technique, boosting your company’s sales and reputation? To help you out, we have prepared a step-by-step methodology regarding mapping sales territories effectively.
Step 1: Assess Market Data
The first and foremost step from which the whole process begins effectively is evaluating the market data. Assessing the market data will assist you in basing your territories on data-driven insights. The following are some things you can evaluate:
- Industries you are currently serving
- Under or over-performing regions
- Location of your competitions
- Your past sales numbers
Assessing these above data will allow you to plan for workload and opportunity along with basing the territories on future and present needs.
Step 2: Build Customer Segments
The next step is to group your customers and prospects into various segments that will later help you to divide the opportunities evenly all over your sales representatives’ territories. You can distinguish them into various segments by some aspects, like business size, target demographic, industry, geographic location, or service/product required. You can use a single segment or several customer segments to effectively divide your sales areas depending on your business needs.
Step 3: Consider Your Sales Goals and Objectives
Before actually mapping out your sales territories, it is recommended to factor in the overall sales objectives and goals of your company. This will assist you in gaining a certain direction and will also ensure that the sales territories you are creating will provide sufficient opportunities to meet the set goals and objectives.
Step 4: Perform a SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. When you perform a SWOT analysis for your sales territories mapping, you will get to know the strengths besides the weaknesses of your sales representatives. You will also find out any external or internal factors that might affect the success of your territories.
Strengths: Assess the particular strengths, skills, and experience of your sales representatives. Is there any employee who is experienced with large corporations? Is the rep with an IT background experienced enough to be well-suited to clients in the IT industry?
Weaknesses: You should also factor out the weaknesses that might be present. By doing this, you can develop more effective sales processes by allowing your territories to work for you. For instance, are there any sort of leaks in your sales pipeline? Are there any particular territories where your resources are limited? Having a lucid idea of your weaknesses will assist you in creating territories that are expected to minimize your weaknesses in the future.
Opportunities: Considering your opportunities will assist you in planning territories with having the future in mind. Are there any untapped markets or under-served regions? Is the area with less competition has a growing demand for a specific service or product? When you are accurately mapping sales territories, considering future opportunities will result in the consistent growth of your company.
Threats: The final step in the SWOT analysis is analyzing certain threats that could result in damaging your territories. Once you understand both internal and external threats in your selling environment, you will already start feeling a significant difference. There could be certain threats that you can find out by getting answers to questions, like: have there been important changes in demand in markets? Are there any new industry standards introduced that will cost your company more time and money?
Step 5: Assign and Define Your Sales Territories
Once you are done with organizing your goals, gaining market data, building customer segments, and performing a SWOT analysis, the next step is assigning and defining your sales territories. While defining your sales territories, make sure that you are creating a balanced plan that will assist your team in achieving their goals and objectives.
Once you have your territories properly defined, the next step is to assign each territory to a certain sales rep. You can either assign a territory to a sales rep by their location or by their area of expertise. Or you can also assign territories based on the combination of both the expertise of your reps and the location.
Another technique that can prove effective while assigning territories to your reps is the distance radius map. According to a distance radius map, you create circles of a certain radius around your selected data points. Distance radius maps are easy-to-understand and they allow you to uncover any possible gaps in your service or sales coverage.
Step 6: Gain Advantages Through the Right Tools
There is certain optimized sales territory mapping software that you can use to map your sales territories effectively. Although it is possible to map your sales territories by hand with the help of an optimized territory mapping tool, there is a chance of human error. These tools will also allow you to make timely decisions based on the past stored data, distribute customers and prospects evenly, and save the valuable time of yourself as well as your sales representatives.
The most noticeable advantage of territory mapping software is that you can conveniently create your sales territories and then distribute them according to data-driven decisions for optimizing efficiency and the overall sales productivity.
In sales territory mapping, there are certain techniques based on which territories are mapped. For instance, the zip code mapping method analyzes data according to ZIP codes. There is numerous zip code mapping software available at a certain price that will accurately perform zip code mapping for you. You can try out the trial versions of such area mapping software to have a better idea of their performance.
What’s available on the market
Currently, due to Salesforce’s dominance in the CRM market, it’s geo-mapping services have become the number one choice for organizations that could afford it. There are many alternatives to Salesforce that you can benefit from at lower costs like the Zoho, Pipedrive, Nimble, etc. There is also a new segment of geo-mapping providers that takes a very different approach and uses AI to help you to manage your territories and optimize the distribution of your sales team. These offerings use a very simplified yet still effective approach. Systems like Grabb Ai are also designed to integrate seamlessly with your current CRM for an enhanced and smarter experience with added benefits.
Conclusion
Territory mapping in sales is a leading technique from which businesses around the world are benefiting to an enormous extent. The technique boasts various methodologies that allow you to reduce the expenses of your organization along with boosting the overall performance.
The performance of sales reps of any organization is certain to boost with the proper use of area mapping tools and techniques. Without territory mapping, any sales company is following a blind path when it comes to reaching customers which eventually leads to a waste of valuable resources and time.
If you have not yet introduced sales territory mapping in your businesses, there is still time to pick-up all the money you have been leaving on the table. It’s never too late for a little positive change. You can use or integrate into your current system Grabb Ai’s territory mapping module that has the particularities of having:
- Detailed sales target per client
- AI-powered segmentation of clients
- Warnings regarding competitors’ in-roads into different territories
Grabb Ai will reduce around 50% time that you usually spend on analysis and administration. Let the intelligent AI systems uplift the productivity of your organization with automated analysis processes. If you are curious, let us know and we will answer all of your queries regarding area mapping in sales along with offering top-notch AI solutions for enhancing the growth of your business.
