Sales mapping is a powerful strategy businesses can use to gain a competitive edge. It combines data visualization and CRM tools with geographic information systems (GIS) technology to optimize sales efforts. However, clean and accurate data is critical to effective sales territory mapping. Learn how to create a map that meets your business needs and avoid the pitfalls of faulty data.
Identifying Key Accounts
Examine your present clientele to find areas of high demand where you can expand your sales territory. You can use third-party data, such as population numbers, hot regions based on industry, or even areas with professional sports teams. These insights will help you make the right changes to your team structure and ensure each sales territory has a fair amount of potential revenue per rep. You can also determine if any areas are underserved, leading to lower productivity and more significant customer churn. While allowing your salespeople to maintain their style and approach is necessary, they must work together as a well-oiled machine. It is essential when establishing a sales process map, which must clearly define the goals of your business and how they will be achieved.
A good sales mapping solution will help you organize your sales process and save time. It provides sales managers and reps with easy-to-use tools to compare their assignments, redistribute leads or customers, and keep track of overall performance. The best solutions will offer features like mobile optimization, an intuitive web portal, and automatic check-ins to make your life easier. They will also include visualizations to streamline the process and provide more accurate data.
Creating a Marketing Strategy
Once you've defined your sales process, it's time to create your marketing strategy. This step is crucial for businesses with multiple product lines or services and can be a great way to streamline your lead-to-sale conversion path. A solid marketing strategy allows you to target and better measure your key accounts and identify potential growth opportunities. When creating a marketing strategy, get buy-in from all teams that interact closely with sales. It ensures that the rest of the company is aligned with your goals and will help you drive more successful business outcomes. Another consideration is the kind of sales territory mapping your organization uses. There are several methods, but geographical sales territory mapping is the most common. It classifies your market based on geographic locations, such as states, cities, and zip codes.
Another popular type of sales territory mapping categorizes territories based on the sales channels used by your reps or clients. This method is helpful for businesses with multiple products or technological offerings, as it can assign agents based on their expertise. For example, Sales Team A might be given to the CRM solution market, while Sales Team B may focus on digital advertising. Lastly, industry-based sales territory mapping divides the marketplace into groups based on specific industries or verticals like education.
Creating a Sales Strategy
Creating an effective sales strategy starts with understanding your customer base and the factors that affect them. It includes geographic data, purchasing behaviors, and the ability to target different customer groups with tailored marketing tactics and services. Involving the team in developing a sales process also increases buy-in and allows for easier adjustments. It also provides opportunities to identify and remove inefficiencies from the sales cycle. The type of sales territory mapping you choose is also essential. While conventionally, sales territories were based on geographical locations such as cities, states, or zip codes, this mapping type is only sometimes optimal. For example, less populated rural areas may require larger geographic territories for sales reps to reach the desired population levels within their sales area.
Using a sales mapping tool that incorporates demographic data can help with this. For instance, Maptive offers the option to bring up population numbers directly on your sales maps to make it easy for teams to create balanced territories with equal populations. The tool also helps with route optimization by allowing reps to select the best route for their day, which can be easily tweaked if a client cancels or a new lead arises. This feature can also keep track of travel expenses and ensure that each salesperson meets their target revenue goals.
Defining Territory
Defining sales territories is one of the most essential aspects of optimizing your sales strategy. It ensures your teams have manageable workloads and can adequately cover all regions. Moreover, it allows you to align your sales process with customer data to promote effective targeting and marketing.
Evaluating your market should be the first step to creating an efficient sales territory map. This evaluation should include customer demographics and purchase behavior to identify regions with the highest market potential. Evaluating the different sales channels your clients or reps use is also essential. It will help you assign a salesperson to each channel according to their expertise.
Another critical aspect of defining sales territories is determining the value of each account. It can be done by evaluating the accounts' profitability or ranking them based on their referral potential. By establishing these criteria, you can ensure that the appropriate rep covers each statement and that they have an adequate revenue base.
In addition to defining sales territories, you can use your mapping application to assign leads or monitor your sales team's performance. For example, some mapping applications allow you to filter your leads by territory or product. This way, you can easily find the best opportunities to close your sales pipeline. Moreover, some tools also offer reminders and reports to help you keep track of your business.
