Your top rep has the largest territory with many of the best accounts. Unfortunately, many of them never get called.

He’s so busy closing deals and crushing quota that he doesn’t have time to cover every account. Meanwhile, half the sales team isn’t even hitting quota. They complain about territories constantly. You have lots of duplicate accounts with new ones discovered every week. It’s a constant battle. It consumes immense energy and selling time.

You want the entire sales team calling the best accounts. This is a common challenge on many sales teams. However, there are many others that have solved this. They have clean territories with iron-clad assignments and reps focus their energy on selling.

How can you fix this and improve your productivity?

Get the Data

The first step is to get the accounts in your territory into the CRM. Build as broad a list of accounts as possible and capture key data points needed to identify the best accounts. This helps us build better territories and avoid fights and lost selling time in the future. You can use common tools like ZoomInfo or LinkedIn and/or solutions specific to the industry you sell to.

Be as exhaustive as possible and make it a regular exercise. Make sure to set rules for creating new accounts so you can prevent duplicates.

Set Territory Sizes

You want to align territories with your Go To Market Strategy and Capacity Planning. You don’t want to give a rep 1,000 accounts if they can only effectively cover 200. You want to give reps the best 200 accounts and empower them to focus on the greatest opportunities.

Determining Capacity depends on your Go To Market Strategy. For example, if you’re selling a transactional product to a single person in each company, your reps can cover a lot more accounts. If you’re selling a strategic solution to a large enterprise with dozens of stakeholders it will take reps much more time to cover each account effectively.

Value Accounts

All accounts are not created equal. You can leverage the data you have on your customers to estimate the potential deal size for each prospect account. This could be based on revenue, employee count, the size of a specific team, the technology they use today, and/or their industry. All of these data points are available in third-party tools like ZoomInfo.

Using this data, we can build territories that give each sales rep the best chance to maximize their production.

Tier Accounts

Let’s take this one step further. Potential deal size is one thing. The potential to close is another.

You and your selling team know what a good account looks like. Interview your team. Research your win/loss data. Create a scoring method that indicates what company is a good fit. If you don’t have the data, start somewhere and give points for the things reps think are important. Start somewhere and then test these assumptions as win and lose more deals.

Go deeper than you believe your competition is going. Leverage all your data to determine the top accounts and rank them by priority.

• Tier 1 – Top 10%
• Tier 2 – Next 20%
• Tier 3 – Next 30%
• Tier 4 – Remaining

Congrats, you just made your sales team at least 50% more efficient. Salespeople can, and should, do their own research.

When they get their territories you’ll still want them to provide a second level of Sales Tiering (different than Revops Tiering) to stay organized. They can update these Sales Tiers as they visit websites, read news, and speak to people in these accounts. Good work, you’ve just given them a huge head start.

Build Territories

Let’s take these accounts and divvy them up based on Tier and potential Deal Size. You likely want to assign just the Tier 1s and Tier 2s, letting marketing cover the rest.

Provide Contact Info

The next step to maximize rep performance is to add relevant contact info. You want to use these tools like ZoomInfo to identify contacts in your Buyer Persona(s) and add titles, email, phone, and, increasingly, LinkedIn and other social channels. The goal here is to make it lightning-fast for reps to research contacts and then reach out with relevant messaging.

Keep Up To Date

Once this is built, constantly add to this. More accounts, more contacts, and more territories will always be needed. If something isn’t assigned to a rep, then make sure to market to them anyways, especially if they are a Tier 1 or 2. Remember, these accounts are likelier to be good fits, but likelier does not mean the only ones. There will be good accounts elsewhere from time to time.

SUMMARY

Don’t just carve up Territories by industry or geography. You don’t want some of your best accounts neglected while salespeople in other territories waste time calling inferior accounts and then fighting about it internally. Leverage your data to identify the best possible accounts and assign them carefully to reps so they all get covered.

Get The Data

• Build the biggest most comprehensive account list possible
• This helps to build the best territories and avoid future fights

Set Territory Sizes

• Build a Capacity Plan based on your Go To Market Strategy
• Set territories with the number of accounts reps can actually cover

Value Accounts

• Leverage your data to estimate potential deal sizes in each account

Tier Accounts

• Leverage your data to rank accounts by the likelihood to close
• Identify the top accounts and make them a Tier 1 or 2

Build Territories

• Assign accounts based on Territory Size, Value, and Tier

Provide Contact Info

• Add relevant info for contacts in your Buyer Persona(s)
• Make it lightning-fast to research contacts and reach out

Keep Up To Date

• Rinse and repeat, this is a never-ending journey
• You always want reps calling the best possible accounts