It never just “goes with the territory”: new analytics solutions can help businesses optimize sales regions

Heightened competition and expectations have challenged sales leaders to achieve ever-increasing sales targets while keeping costs low. The highest-performing sales teams frequently evaluate and adapt their sales strategies to navigate the dynamic sales landscape. While there are a wide variety of methods to improve sales performance, one proven approach is creating optimal sales modules. For many companies with a large sales force in the field, sales modules are best defined by geographic sales territories.

Typically sales territories have been built around locations of regional offices, or in the case of remote workers, where those workers live. This is unfortunate since a well-designed sales territory can dramatically improve a company’s sales operations and its ability to maximize sales force productivity, without a large investment. Past Altman Vilandrie & Company clients have seen greater than a 5% monthly sales boost without significant capital investment or additional sales reps through sales territory optimization.
Through a combination of sophisticated analytic techniques, a thorough understanding of our client’s business operations, and proprietary modeling solutions, we help leading businesses refine their existing sales territories or create a new program – in some cases exceeding the optimization benefit cited above. Altman Vilandrie & Company’s Territory Design process involves three phases:

• In the Territory Creation phase, our methodology equitably distributes the available sales opportunity and includes feasibility factors like drive time and geographic contiguity. Our industry expertise, analysis of the competitive landscape, and use of firmographic data allow us to consider the effects of various factors, such as current asset presence and distribution (e.g., a telecom operator’s network or a tech company’s consumer-facing sales channel outlets). This comprehensive process enables our clients to place sales representatives in a position to succeed. While our solution is designed to meet our TMT clients’ unique needs integrating our own TMT-specific (Technology-Media-Telecom) proprietary data assets, we have also advised clients on adopting pre-packaged commercial software solutions supporting the vendor evaluation process, conducting the necessary data analysis to load into the software, and providing guidance on how to incorporate the software output into business operations.
• In the Territory Assignment phase, we work closely with our clients to minimize disruption as they transition to their new, optimized territories. By tailoring a strategy that integrates client-specific algorithms and broader industry-wide data, clients can optimize sales productivity relative to the unique performance, organizational structure, and geo-specific opportunities in each territory, as well as providing tactical recommendations on specific geographic areas for sales reps to target.
• In the Change Management phase, we often support a cross-functional team that is implementing and maintaining the new sales territories. Our role can vary depending on the client's needs but has included training, communications, rules of engagement, sales compensation and hiring plans, financial planning, periodic analytic refreshes, and general support for internal project managers. Our specialization in the TMT sector helps ensure our change management support work within the practical constraints of our clients’ business operations.

Altman Vilandrie & Company believes that properly designed and implemented Sales Territories can improve prospect and customer sales coverage, better utilize sales talent, and significantly reduce inefficiencies. For decades, inefficient sales force deployment has been defined by the phrase “it goes with the territory;” now is the time for forward-thinking companies to take a new look at the landscape.