Whether dealing with company sales staff or franchisees, territory management is a sensitive and challenging task.

Territory Management 2.0

Sales managers are required to keep the sales force productive and satisfied by having everyone feel they have a fair share of territory leads and making sure nobody is getting preferential treatment. At the same time, each territory has to be balanced in such a way that representatives are encouraged to perform to their full potential and have realistic sales targets.

Location analytics provides the perfect real-time business management solution to these sales and franchise challenges, especially if demographic and other relevant data is reflected on a map rather than on data tables. The result is a more sophisticated, intuitive analysis of market factors.

Businesses can use age, gender, social grades and psychographic data to mark a territory not on size or the number of people living there, but rather on the number of people in the key target demographics.

Using location analytics also helps get the right staff in the right area. A company can choose to send out sales representatives that are similar to the targeted customer profiles in order to build rapport faster.

The Benefits

Being able to show critical demographic summaries on a map can make it easier to negotiate territory allocation. By arguing quality over quantity and the possible outcome of professional skills in relation to the area’s profile, a company’s sales force can become more competitive and effective. Sales managers can also have a better understanding of the elements that negatively impact revenue and performance, and how professional qualification and talent plays out on the field.

With the right system, it’s easier to balance out the territories in a more nuanced way. There’s no justification to stick to crude methods such as giving each person a particular town or, worse, a 10-mile radius of a particular point. Location analytics makes it possible to drill down by individual postcodes and create custom territories that are better balanced and matched.

Conclusion

Visual analytics brings huge practical advantages, whether used for planning a territory expansion, running competitor analysis or fine-tuning consumer profiles. Businesses can instantly grasp the practical advantages of different territory breakdowns; such as making it is easy to spot when a proposed territory is simply too big for one person to cover or if a sales rep’s job will be harmed by a lack of roads or potential traffic jam blackspots.