How to Determine the Right Number of Territories with a Workload Capacity Model

How to Determine the Right Number of Territories with a Workload Capacity Model:

Using a workload capacity model to design territories is a concise and succinct method to assure that your organization’s sales talent is well aligned with market demand. A sales leader must understand and quantify several key pieces of information in order to use a workload capacity model in territory design:

1. Frequency of sales visits and general contact requirements needed by your existing customer account base. Is a monthly face to face visit required? What type of visit does your customer prefer – face to face, or will a simple phone call suffice? In some cases, national or even international travel is required to meet for each sales call or contract review. Understanding and quantifying this time investment is a key requirement to accurately flesh out your territories.
2. The types of activities necessary to produce a fruitful call must be identified. For example, what are the pre-call activities, post-call activities, and other general admin duties required for a specific type of client interaction? They should be identified and quantified.
3. Account types. Have you segmented your account base? Is each account broken into a clear category based upon its importance to your organization? Is an account an “A”, “B” or “C” customer through its sales or profitability contribution? Accounts are usually stratified or segmented based upon several key pieces of information, sales, margin, strategic position, etc…
4. Total number of accounts in each segment to be serviced. The volume both in terms of existing customer accounts and future prospect accounts should be fully understood.

Rep Capacity: Once you have identified each of these key components, calculating the number of territories is as straightforward as doing the math. This concept sounds easy, but in our consulting firm’s experience, it is surprising how often these crucial concepts are not fully fleshed out in the sales world. This is the thinking and decision process that makes sales goals and objectives an operational reality.

The example above concludes from an activity based territory design method, the total required number of rep territories is 77. To learn more about this topic, watch my recorded webinar embeded below on "Instant Improvements for Segmenting Your Accounts- How to Determine the Real Potential of Your Territory"

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