Balanced on opportunity, not on how many logos each rep got.
Most territories are drawn on state lines because that is how they have always been drawn. A state line tells you where a border is. It does not tell you where your buyers are, or where they are moving.
The result is a book that looks tidy on a map and is wildly uneven in practice. Every rep believes theirs is the bad one, and nobody can prove otherwise.
Counting accounts is the most common balancing method and the least useful. Two hundred accounts in a saturated region is not equivalent to eighty in a growing one.
Score every account on fit and intent, sum the potential by territory, and balance on that. The target is every book within a few percent of the same opportunity, not the same headcount.
This is a geospatial problem and it should be solved with geospatial tools. Esri and similar GIS software will show you where customers concentrate, where demographics are shifting, and where a boundary should actually fall.
On one engagement that work showed growth concentrating central and west. We stopped drawing on state lines and cut zones at the grain the buyers lived at, crossing borders where the data said they should.
A territory map that lives in a slide is a map that drifts. Assignment has to be a rule in the CRM, evaluated on record creation, so a new account lands with the right owner without anyone thinking about it.
Otherwise you are back to manual reassignment within a quarter, and the balance you designed is gone.
On opportunity, not account count. Score accounts on fit and intent, sum potential per territory, and aim for every book within a few percent of the same total. Equal account counts almost always produce unequal books.
Only if your buyers do. State lines are an administrative boundary, not a market boundary. Zones cut on where customers actually concentrate will usually cross state lines, and that is correct.
GIS software such as Esri for the geographic and demographic analysis, firmographic and intent data for account scoring, and then the CRM itself for assignment rules so the design holds.
Annually, as part of planning. More often than that and reps cannot build relationships. Less often and the map drifts away from where the market actually is.
Decide the rule before you redraw: open opportunities usually stay with the current owner through close, new creation follows the new map. Write it down before anyone sees the new boundaries.
We use cookies to run the site and to understand how it is used. You can accept all or necessary only. See our privacy notice.