If your sales territories were designed years ago and haven’t been updated, chances are they’re costing you revenue—not driving it.
Sales and Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams play an increasingly strategic role in businesses today, and one of their most important tasks is efficient territory planning. Properly designed sales territories directly impact your team’s ability to meet sales goals, improve performance, and retain top talent. Yet, many companies still use outdated methods like spreadsheets for territory planning, which ultimately slows down their sales potential.
Territory design and optimization should be an ongoing process. Sales teams that strategically design and refine their territories can boost productivity by 10–20%. That’s why a Territory Management Solution is essential for improving sales productivity and achieving revenue goals.
The Struggles with Manual Territory Planning
Many sales teams are stuck using spreadsheets or outdated tools to carve out territories. While simple, these methods fail to handle the complexities of modern sales, especially as businesses scale. Relying on basic segmentation—such as geographic areas or a limited number of accounts—often leads to imbalanced territories, leaving sales reps with fewer opportunities to hit their targets.
Recent business insight found that 76% of companies still use a geographic sales territory model to assign accounts to sales reps, and 83% of companies design their territories with spreadsheets. This process is time-consuming and prone to errors.
Here’s more bad news: Sales teams become frustrated with inequitable territory distribution, and sales operations (SalesOps) are bogged down with constant territory updates, leading to poor morale and potentially high turnover rates.
To avoid these issues, businesses need a Territory Management Solution that provides the tools for efficient territory design, automation, and runtime management.
Read more: Territory Management: Using the Right Resources To The Right Opportunities
Key Benefits of a Territory Management Solution
The primary benefit of a Territory Management Solution is its ability to create balanced, fair territories that align with your corporate strategy. By using real-time data and metrics that matter most to your business, you can ensure that your sales reps are assigned territories that reflect your sales goals.
1. Design Balanced Territories That Align with Your Strategy
Automation within a Territory Management Solution helps ensure that territories are always aligned with your sales strategy. When there are changes—such as new product launches or market shifts—territories can be updated and synced across your systems (like CRMs) instantly, without downtime. This ensures sales reps can continue focusing on high-value tasks, not firefighting.
2. Boost Sales Quota Attainment
A well-designed territory plan significantly impacts quota attainment. Research shows that companies using automated territory mapping can see up to 30% higher sales quota attainment. This means that a rep with a $1M quota could generate an additional $174,000 in revenue annually by being assigned to more equitable and balanced territories.
Having a Territory Management Solution in place eliminates the problems of imbalanced territories, which can lead to sluggish sales performance and even sales rep attrition. By assigning accounts based on opportunity, revenue potential, and other key criteria, every rep has a fair chance to meet or exceed their quota.
3. Improve Sales Rep Retention
Did you know around 31% of sales reps resign in their first year?
With a Territory Management Solution, territory design becomes more transparent. Sales reps will have more confidence in the fairness of their assignments. When territories are equitable and aligned with business goals, reps are more motivated to stay on target, which reduces turnover and ultimately increases revenue.
Read more: Improve Sales Rep Retention With Good Territory Management
4. Streamline Planning and Reduce Time Spent on Administrative Tasks
Manual territory planning can take months, especially if spreadsheets are involved. But with a Territory Management Solution, this process can be reduced to days, and in some cases, hours. AI-driven solutions automate much of the heavy lifting, allowing your RevOps team to spend more time on strategic initiatives and less time on administrative tasks like balancing territories.
By automating runtime changes, territory management becomes more agile. SalesOps teams can adjust territory plans throughout the year based on factors such as account performance, new products, or emerging markets—without needing to rework spreadsheets or add extra headcount.
5. Do More with Fewer Resources
During tough economic times, it’s crucial to operate more efficiently. A Territory Management Solution allows businesses to be leaner while still supporting a growing sales team. By automating territory management and reducing time spent on manual tasks, businesses can accomplish more with the same—or even fewer—resources.
Read more: Recession-proof Your GTM and Territory Plans
For example, using a Territory Management Solution might save your RevOps team hundreds of hours in annual planning time, allowing them to redirect that time toward high-impact sales activities instead of administrative duties.
The Need for a Territory Management Solution
If you’re looking to increase your sales productivity and revenue, a Territory Management Solution is no longer optional. It’s essential for designing balanced, fair territories that align with your business strategy, improve quota attainment, and retain top sales talent.
Don’t let outdated territory planning hold you back. Embrace a Territory Management Solution today and watch your sales team exceed their targets and drive business growth.