What are some elements that are involved when you're evaluating the effectiveness of a territory plan? I think that you certainly you're looking at a lot. Most of the time when you're evaluating territory plans you're looking at internal data. You're looking at your sales that are coming from the territory. The individual performers within that territory and how they're being credited towards those sales at all. I think that that's a really good place to start. The thing that you sometimes want to look at though when it comes to rethinking your territories, is data or information that's external to your own operations? Like when possible, do you know what your competition is doing and how well they're doing, right? What if your sales had been relatively stable? I've been pretty much making the same amount, salespeople performing pretty much the same level. You may look at that and say, "I don't think I need to change anything. Things are fine thank you." But what if competition is growing at a much a faster rate than you? So, that actually, maybe your sales territories aren't right. Maybe we need to realign things because somehow you're leaving a lot of business on the table, and you're not getting your fair share of what that is. So, I think that a really useful part of it is that outside perspective. Getting a sense as to what's going on in the world around you is really useful to the sales manager. How long can it take for a new market to evolve into a mature market? Oh, my goodness. I wish I had the answer to that. There are lots of factors that influence how the market matures. The things that you often are looking at is the penetration in that market. Like of all the customers that are in the market, how many of them have adopted the product, right? So, there's various rules of thumb about things, but until the market has got at least 30 to 40 percent penetration, I would still say it's very developing. You're not looking at the majority of the customers in that market are not buying the product. So by definition, it's not quite where it ought to be. I think that the markets have a predictable thing where they will be the first company that enters the market and they begin to get some successful things. So, of course, others see that and they jump into that market. That's like that crazy time where everyone is trying to elbow each other and trying to gain market share and all. Then in some cases, some of those people who entered maybe will drop back out. It's at that point where you're beginning to see the market to stabilize. So until you pass that point, I would still say things are developing. What are some qualities of sale managers should consider when you're assigning individual people to territories? Well, I think it's a combination of what your overall goals are, what you're looking to try to achieve for your business. What the market is demanding. What is necessary to succeed in the marketplace, and then some an assessment as to your resources that you have available, the sales force and the people who are there and what their capabilities and what they do best to do. I think that really smart sales plans recognize and tries to come up with a solution that accomplishes or deals with all of those factors together. I sometimes see decisions that are made which are much more internally driven. Will such and such a salesperson there are good calling on these customers, so we'll make them cover that segment and somebody else is really aggressive, so we'll put them on the really hard customers that are tough to get and all. I'm not suggesting that those aren't things that should be concluded in that, but if that's all you've looked at, you're not considering what were your goals in the first place for the company and what's going on in the marketplace to drive that in the future. So, how does one determine the potential opportunities and threats to success within a given territory? I think the biggest challenge that I think we got, we cover this in our material is trying to come up with sort of, what is the market potential. If everything went exactly right, and if everybody bought everything that they should buy, what's the total pie? How big is that? I think at a conceptual level everybody gets that. It's good to understand and incredibly useful then in terms of trying to decide where you need to go because you then know what's the absolute upside potential of what we want. But getting at that can be really tricky, it can be very hard to predict what that would be. So I think in some cases, we run into a problem where we make some faulty assumptions or we define market potential in ways that are not really valid, and then ultimately, everything kind of case in because of that. But I think that understanding what is like the end goal? What is the market? What's the size of that market and what's the characteristics of that market? Understanding that then helps you then to determine how do you best allocate your sales resource within that market. Once you recognize that a sales territory is out of balance, what are some of the strategies that you can use to restore it? Well, I think there's so many different kinds of problems. But I would say that a sales territory either is over-resourced or under-resourced. So, over-resource means you've got more sales people fighting over a piece of the pie that maybe isn't as big as you would wanted it to be or what so that the sales potential is not what it once was or what you thought it was going to be. Under-resourced is a different kind of a problem, means the market is growing and you're not growing along with the market and you're not putting those resources in. So, I think that one of the things that you need to do is define, what are we dealing with here? What is the problem at hand? Are we talking about an an over-resource or under-resourced kind of thing? In situations where a sales territory is under-resourced, I think the answer is one either shrinking the size of the territory and maybe you had one big territory and now you've got two with two separate sales forces that are operating in there. Or in some cases, just simply adding to the volume of sales force or salespeople that you've got in that particular market, so to takes care of that. In situations where it's over-resourced, that's a much more difficult situation because you're being asked to then reallocate your resources. Well, practically speaking, that may mean reducing your sales force in size or having to re-allocate them, making them move to other parts of the country, and those are hard managerial decisions.
