What are some elements involved in evaluating the effectiveness of a territory plan? Well, first of all, you have to you understand you're paying a salesperson for that particular territory. So, there has to be enough potential volume in that particular area to support their salary and a profit to the company. So, it needs to be sizable enough. It also needs to be maintainable, well, maintainable by the salesperson. So, it can't be too spread out where they're not able to really reach potential customers in a timely manner. How long can it take for a new market to evolve into a mature market? It depends on the market, it really does. I would say anywhere from four to 10 years minimum, and it really does depend on what type of product or service that you're offering. Some markets are more technical and complex and take longer to develop, and therefore, will be a longer process. Some are much quicker and maybe smaller markets and can go to maturity faster than others. What are some qualities that a sales managers should consider when they're assigning individual salespeople to a territory? Well, first thing would be sales experience. So, more sales, more experienced salespeople should probably have higher dollar volume and accounts more volume because they're more experienced in that process. Usually, younger new hires, smaller accounts, so they can learn and work with smaller accounts. I think those are the two key areas. How does one determine potential opportunities and threats to success in a given territory? Well, first, if you have a certain specific territory, one of the first things you do is you generate a whole list of leads, potential people that could buy from you. Then, you take the time to qualify those leads, which means can they afford whatever it is you're offering? Are they candidates to use that product specifically? So, you go through this qualification process. If you get done with that and you don't have hardly any qualified prospects, then it's not a real viable territory for whatever particular product or service you're selling. Once a sales territory is recognized to be out of balance, what are some strategies you can take to restore it? It depends on what you mean by out of balance. For example, years ago, I had a territory in Washington, D.C. It started out in a very small territory about $300,000 quota. It's a small area but very concentrated. So, I worked on that territory for like five years and what happened is it grew to over five million dollars. This was out of balance for one salesperson to handle. So, when it gets to that kind of situation in this particular case, the concern was where we taken care of these customers when you only have one person? That's an out of balance situation. You either come in with some support to make sure you take care of the customers that you already have or you break down that territory a little bit more so that it's more manageable for one person. In that situation when you were the salesperson in an out of balance territory, what were some of the problems that arose as a result? The biggest problem was maintaining and taking care of these customers. So, usually, I would see them once or twice a week. When you get to those volumes to see them, you don't have the time to do the paperwork and put in the orders and follow through and make sure that what you ordered for them actually arrived, and so you end up really nervous that if it doesn't go exactly as planned, which it never does, then you might have a dissatisfied customer.
