If things are to get better, they have to change. But it takes a lot of courage to innovate. Sales territory planning is truly an ongoing theme, because business success depends upon a high-performing, efficient external sales force. However, sales territory planning can involve some potential pitfalls and difficulties. RegioGraph and experienced consultants can shed light on this process and help you achieve a successful implementation.

Sales territory planning with RegioGraph - A piece of cake

Sales territory planning without geomarketing is hard to imagine these days: A company is simply not competitive without an efficient and fair distribution of workload, potential, driving times and customer accessibility within the individual sales territories. Shockingly, some companies have external sales force territories that have long since ceased to correspond to the reality of the market - these outdated structure are simply carried forward year after year. This results in turnover shortfalls, dissatisfication among the sales force and sometimes even decreases in the quality of customer service.

It's therefore essential to regularly evaluate the efficiency of the external sales force and continually adjust structures based on the prevailing market conditions.

Before changing the external sales force structure, a company should analyze the current state of things and articulate goals. A geomarketing software like RegioGraph provides an indispensable foundation for an objective, transparent and measurable determination of the current status of the company's operations. Every company with an external sales force should regionally visualize its territory structure and thoroughly examine and compare, on a territory by territory basis, the turnover results, turnover potential, number of customers and employee workload.

With RegioGraph, all of these factors can be illustrated and visually com-pared on digital maps in just minutes: Pie charts show the turnover share in addition to the territory size and number of customers as well as the accessibility of the company locations via the transportation network. The huge advantage of visualizing this company data is that many different factors can be simultaneously evaluated and compared. Trends and relationships that might never have been spotted in spreadsheets or CRM systems are immediately apparent. Gaps and weaknesses in the sales network can also be recognized right away.

When performing a market analysis, a company should incorporate data on potential as well as a good geomarketing software capable of powerful calculations and insight-generating analysis tools. Only then can a company determine whether it is fully exploiting the existing regional potential! The performance of individual sales force members can be evaluated by comparing their output against the total potential - it then becomes clear which sales force members are best converting potential into actual turnover.

Knowledge gained from this process can then often be used to set optimization goals for the external sales force, including: Better exploit potential by expanding the sales team; apportion potential and workload more fairly; create sale territories that offer equal opportunities for success; etc. How-ever, sometimes the external sales force should be reduced in order to achieve greater market efficiency.
At the same time, there are of course always limiting factors that must be taken into account when adjusting sales territories. These include em-ployees places of residence, areas with territorial exclusivity, key account customers who need to continue being serviced by the same representatives, natural barriers such as mountain ranges and rivers, etc. RegioGraph offers an array of professional sales territory planning tools that let you easily take these things into account! Territorial boundaries can be automatically generated or edited manually. In the case of the latter, users can move territories back and forth between different external sales force regions and then immediately see the effect of these changes on the turnover distribution.

This turns a highly complex planning initiative into a piece of cake: These tasks can be completed in just hours, while they would have taken weeks and even months in the days of wall maps and pins. One of the advantages of planning with a geomarketing software like RegioGraph is the ability to present and distribute the results in a variety of ways, including internationally recognizable maps, reports and of course digitally. This means that everyone involved in the sales territory planning - from heads of sales and the external sales force to the management and controlling divisions - are always aware of the latest status and have an up-to-date overview of the changes. When it comes to sales territory planning, RegioGraph helps promote confidence and transparency like no other tool. And the new market potential identified by this process often makes it possible for companies to realize a two-digit percentage point increase in turnover!