Categories: Sales Planning
As a sales leader, your ability to coach your team on how to leverage potential opportunities within their territories can drive the organizational growth needed to drive revenue in your sales organization. Your sales planning discipline around territory planning and management processes should include the ability to:
- Coach your reps on building and maintaining a high quality (healthy) pipeline
- Provide yourself visibility into your business
- Enable your entire team to “row in the same direction”
- Help your reps fuel growth
- What is the objective of territory planning in your organization?
- What is the value of the territory plan? Does it provide the visibility as to where pipeline can be built?
- How do you ensure your sales teams are focused on the right accounts within a territory?
- How do your account executives build pipeline? Do they have visibility into the different avenues where pipeline can be built?
Effective territory management is a key enabler of building a successful pipeline. If you run your sales organization by focusing on building pipeline, you can’t fail.
When your reps have a solid grasp of their territories, they’ll focus on building their pipeline at the territory level rather than scrambling to fuel the forecast at the opportunity level. Targeted and coordinated sales activities at the territory level will drive a healthy pipeline that can make the difference between meeting this quarter’s revenue goals and falling short.
As a sales leader, it’s important that you take the critical steps to coach your team to maximize their territories and pipeline opportunities. A comprehensive approach to sales planning maximizes your efforts. Here are three simple steps to that break down the critical components to effective territory management:
- Gather and Analyze
- Plan and Strategize
- Organize and Execute
Many sales leaders are completing some of these critical steps to coach teams on building pipeline. It’s important however, that we complete all of these steps to achieve success.
Missed steps equal missed revenue.
Often our perception of the time is takes to do all of these steps is typically what keeps us from building this into our routine. BUT, in actual time spent, it is less than what we believe. It’s also nowhere near close to the time it will take for you to rectify poor planning at the end of every quarter.
