Defining Sales Territory:
Sales territory is the geographical location with specific boundaries assigned to a salesperson to get business. Sales territory can be divided based on region, industry, or account type and is assigned to a specific salesperson or a sales team.
A sales territory owner is accountable for getting business from their specified territory. For this he conducts the entire sales process. The activities like prospecting, presentation and follow up and order closing is done by the salesperson or by the sales team.
A retail shopkeeper has a showroom from where he sells his goods to the customer and generates business, the showroom works as the sales territory for shopkeeper. The showroom must be very well organized for getting the best sales results. Similarly, a field salesperson must organize his geographical sales territory to get the best results.
Issues in Territory Coverage Management:
One of the major reasons for failure in selling is the poor territory coverage. An average salesperson moves randomly in his territory and spend lots of time, wasting in travelling alone. An average salesperson one day travels in one direction and another day in some other direction depending upon the location from which the prospect call comes. There is no planning of time and travel. This consumes lots of his energy and the most precious resource, his ‘working time’.
Benefits of Planning of Territory Coverage:
Planning, executing and conducting the sales activity in a sales territory can do the “make or break” for a salesperson’s career or the future of his business. Income largely depends upon the time you spend in your selling activities. Therefore, as a salesperson it becomes your duty to ensure that you use your time extremely effectively!
My name is Rakesh Sharma and I support the business owners and the salespeople to grow their business and maximize their profits. I provide a range of quality tools for the business and sales growth to the salespeople and business owners. Today I am going to share with you how you can utilize the potential of your sales territory and your time effectively. I am going to give you some specific tips, if you apply you will be able to become more productive.
Therefore, before I begin, I advise you to get a pen and notepad to make notes of how you can apply the tips and tricks below in your sales practice.
Planning your Territory Coverage effectively:
· To cover your territory properly you can divide the entire geographical area into four parts. And you can plan to visit the customers in each of these quadrants on one day. When you make appointments and visits in one quadrant on one day then you save lots of travel time and you can increase your customer face to face interaction time. Increasing customer face to face interaction time will give you more talk time which will improve your results and you’ll be able to enhance your sales.
· If some customer insist you to meet on a day, which you have not planned for or that cluster then you can politely communicate to the prospect that you will be there on that particular day and you’ll be happy to meet them and ask to fix the appointment accordingly. Be a salesperson of high integrity and planning and don’t hesitate to communicate your commitments to your customer. It is better to communicate about your prior commitment rather than giving a false promise to the customer. The customers build much more respect for such a planned salesperson.
· Keep the travel map of all your customers readily available in your mobile. So that you do not waste too much of your time in searching for the location. The use of GPS will help a lot and this. Also ensure that the contact details like the mobile number and email id must be read and easily available to you.
Many salespeople have been able to increase their sales results by 20 to 30{2facf265810d5c64deca339a00197305ceb917dadef902f2426694cb75f36e2b} by properly reorganizing their sales territories because they find themselves spending less time in travelling on the road. The more people you visit, the more you will be able to sell.
My mission is to empower more than 1 lakh business owners and salespeople in coming less than three years and help them scale up their business, for doing this we provide them lots of business growth tools. You can also become part of this campaign by sharing this article to all your business friends.
Thanks for reading and Happy Selling!
