Most field-service businesses understand the importance of effective territory management- it can prevent territory overlap between field reps, which causes confusion and wastes time. By clearly defining territories, you can implement a strategy to ensure that field reps will not compete against each other for the same customer or visit a customer twice. Effective territory management can also save you time and money. These 5 steps will help you create a territory management plan that will lead you to success:
As an example, we’ll see how Matt’s Snacks, a Boston-based company, devised a territory management plan to increase their efficiency.
Segment your customers. Place your clients into different categories for easier organization and divide the territories accordingly. Each territory should have good potential, be of reasonable size, and have minimal obstacles. A good way to segment clients is by buyer personas- group clients have the same product and similar needs all together. Some people also segment according the size of the retailer. Once categorized, you can use Field Activity Management (FAM) software to sort and filter clients by territory, making it easier to draw territory lines and redistribute field rep assignments as needed.
Matt’s Snacks segmented their customers by geography because his clients were in dispersed locations. Matt figured this would make it easier to divide up a large territory this way.
Develop a plan. By looking at your retail execution strategy, you can devise a plan based around your core objectives, but you should also define your objectives by client as well. By breaking down your objectives by customer, you can construct a more detailed plan of how much time you should allocate to each client. It will be helpful if you include your field reps in this process- if they helped to develop the plan, then they will be more likely to follow it. While creating a strategy, you should be keeping three things in mind- you want to maintain current clients, reach out to potential clients, and obtain new clients from your competitors. Your plan should help you accomplish each of these three things.
Matt had growing demand from small to medium retailers, so his objective was to be able handle all of the demand and have his field reps visit each client regularly to avoid out of stock instances and maintain client relationships. He then looked at how to achieve these objectives. He found that some customers were of more importance than others, and created a plan to ensure that they were given more time than other less important retailers.
Schedule your visits and plan your route. Once you’ve decided how much time you want to spend on each client visit, schedule your visits so that you can plan the most effective route from one client to another based on proximity.
Matt then called each retailer and created a schedule so that he could begin planning the routes for each field rep to take.
Delegate. Assign each field rep a territory to cover. By making this very clear, you can avoid territory overlap. Take into consideration the specific capabilities of the reps you have and try and match them to the territory you believe would be most suitable. For instance, if one rep is able to visit more clients in a day than most of your other reps, then you can assign this rep a territory that has more clients. Be sure to consider your reps’ personal connections and strengths as well. If they have built strong relationships with one client, then you should keep them in that client’s territory.
After scheduling all of the visits, Matt called together this team of field reps and began to delegate territories to each one. For example, he gave Phil, his top performer, the territory with the most clients because he knew that Phil would be able to handle it. He gave Jack the territory with mostly rural areas because he knew Jack was skilled at covering long distances quickly.
Implement and evaluate. Once you put your plan into action, you will begin to see the little things you may have missed. See what issues come up, evaluate how to best overcome them, and address them accordingly. For example, if you think that travel time is still too high, you can use Field Activity Management (FAM) software to track your reps’ mileage and location, allowing you to plan the most time-efficient route. Don’t be afraid to experiment a little- try different things and evaluate the results of each change. You may find that an idea that seems a little bizarre at first may actually be the most effective one.
After implementing his plan, Matt began to see that there were territories that had not yet been fully expanded into. He gave Jamie the task of opening new outlets- since Jamie was already in the territory that had the fewest clients, Jamie could then locate and target retailers that could potentially carry Matt’s Snacks products.
Through a well-thought out territory management plan, you can ensure that you are maximizing the efficiency of your field reps’ client visits. Good territory management practices will not only save you time, but it should improve your field reps’ coverage, build deeper relationships between clients and field reps, and add revenue. It can also give you a leg up on the competition if you are more efficient than they are. By decreasing travel time and other transportation expenses, each visit will cost you less. Your field reps will ultimately be happier- they can now be at their most productive, especially with an even distribution of clients in each territory.
Strategies For Effective Territory Management
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