business development staff performing sales territory mappingSales territory mapping is a critical component of sales planning. However, the process behind researching consumers in your business area and creating a strategy to reach that market can be tedious and complex.

Top Benefits of Sales Territory Mapping

Sales territory mapping essentially gives your sales team an action plan that can be used to map the area where your sales team will operate, allocate certain tasks to your sales reps, and keep track of where they go and their on-the-job activities. It also allows you to target new prospects and prevents reps from wasting their time in an over saturated region.

Performance Measuring

It can be difficult to track performance long-term when you only have sales reports and similar types of documents to refer to. Sales territory mapping provides business owners with a visual map with critical data plotted to make it easy to see performance over a period of time. Mapping software can be an invaluable tool for business owners who want to create reports and measure their performance against their competition. These reports can also be shared among managers and colleagues to keep all parties informed about the progress of sales.

Increasing Sales

mapping software being used in a warehouse to track salesThe benefits of sales territory alignment are not only measurable but can result in a noticeable boost in sales. By undergoing the sales territory mapping process, you can increase and focus your customer coverage area. This allows your sales force to spend more time in front of real prospects who are interested in your products or services and less time traveling from place to place in search of customers. In turn, this results in shorter drive times and travel expenses which means a bigger profit when sales are made.

Identifying Underserved Areas

Sales territory mapping can be useful for identifying hidden insights through the visualization of data from spreadsheets and other sources. When you develop an interactive map with mapping software, you can get a more detailed look at where your business stands as a whole, as well as where possible over-served or under-served territories exist. When you know what territories are not being fully served, you can create a plan to ensure that more of your sales team members are pushing your products or services in these areas. If you find that some areas are over-served, you can pull back from these areas and focus your efforts elsewhere.

More Effective Delegation

As a busy business owner, you are forced to delegate work to your employees. However, the way that business owners delegate tasks are not always efficient, resulting in lost time and money. By implementing territory hierarchies, business owners are able to delegate more effectively, as all members of the team are clearly able to see the territories and what each person in the organization is responsible for. A typical territory hierarchy may have a VP of sales handling the entire East Coast, regional managers covering different counties, and individual salespersons responsible for each region.

Time Saving

a person checking their watch showing how sales territory mapping helps save timeSales territory maps result in greater efficiency throughout the workplace. In turn, this saves time as your sales team will not have to spend endless hours creating sales maps from scratch. Sales territory mapping software has the ability to categorize various aspects of your sales, such as the regions or areas that have a low or high potential, the regions with a high volume, and the regions that have high-quality leads. With this information, territories can be quickly mapped. Sales territory mapping also saves time in other areas, such as the measuring of performance across territories.

Enhanced Collaboration

As a business owner, you are always looking for new ways to bring your workforce together to create a more cohesive and productive team. Territory management has the power to boost collaboration and sharing within your team, which can be beneficial for all involved. With the growth of technology, it is now easier than ever for team members to collaborate from any location. For example, a sales team may turn to cloud-based solutions in order to collaborate from their unique territories. With the cloud, members can also add their own data and sales on a day-to-day basis to keep everyone up-to-date on the progress of sales.

Speak to Sales Territory Mapping Specialists

There are a number of key benefits to creating a clearly-defined sales territory map. You can easily map out areas and assign them to specific reps, create hierarchies so that every member of your team knows their exact role and sales location, maintain real-time visibility to ensure all territories are covered and remain organized as reps move from location to location. While sales territory mapping can be a highly advantageous way to save time, make more money, and essentially grow your company, there is room for confusion and error. To learn more about sales territory mapping or for assistance with creating a sales territory map, contact Geographic Enterprises.