How Territory and Quota Planning Supports Key Business Goals
By: Russell Gummelt
During the last mile of sales — securing signatures and inking new revenue — your sales team is also building critical connections with prospects or repeat customers.
Realistic quotas and balanced territory planning can go a long way toward empowering your sales agents to make those positive, enduring connections on behalf of your organization. But how do managers and sales leaders generate such guidelines?
Answer: data analytics paired with expert analysis.
Aligning territories and quotas with individual sales reps’ strengths creates additional revenue lift, while customers benefit from more meaningful brand experiences.
So, how can you move toward a data-driven approach to territory and quota planning?
Leveraging a broad set of relevant data
Your company continuously generates data that, along with effective analysis, can effectively inform key aspects of territory and quota planning.
While intuition will always play a role in efficient processes and positive results, basing complex decisions related to territories and quotas on data:
Provides clear reasoning for specific actions.
Applies critical context that helps position sales teams for the best chance of success.
Quota planning
In terms of quota planning specifically, predictive data leads the way in developing individualized and ideal goals for each sales representative. The following types of information are crucial for quota planning success:
Account potential.
Historical performance.
Market opportunity.
Territory data
By including these types of data in analysis, developing effective quotas becomes a much more manageable and positive process. Taking the unique factors of each territory and rep into account leads to quotas that leverage the talents of reps on an individual level and encourages them to meet their goals.
Your organization has plenty of room to choose a strategy that works best for its structure, operational needs and sales goals. Top-down, bottom-up and hybrid models can all be effective in setting data-based goals.
By incorporating data into decision-making and sales modeling, sales staff can better collaborate with managers and executives. Plus, sales reps can take a leading role in determining how processes can be streamlined and resources allocated.
Additionally, incentives drive sales reps, encouraging them to take on difficult or complicated clients through the promise of a reward. With a data-driven approach to quota planning, you can ensure that each and every rep has a realistic opportunity to earn this additional compensation.
Territory planning
Efficient territory planning means maximizing geographical coverage, balancing clients and prospects distributed between staff and providing them with a full but manageable schedule.
Predictive data and analysis play key roles in creating efficient territories by delivering vital context to decision-makers. Projecting a variety of sales scenarios can help unveil potential problems and empower leaders to create balanced territories.
Machine learning can also make territory planning more effective. Leveraging this powerful solution leads to sales territory options that offer complete coverage, eliminating gaps that can directly cost your company.
Better insight can quickly develop into effective prioritization. Your company almost certainly has certain accounts and regions where performance is strong, and others where improvement is an especially important goal. Developing balanced territories makes it easier to assign sales reps to the right accounts, based on their experience and abilities, for the best possible results.
Keeping territories relevant and up to date is a continuous concern for businesses that understand how fast circumstances can change. A manual approach to revisiting data and defining new territories can leave businesses struggling to keep up even when they have an otherwise effective plan.
Predictive data and analysis can help your organization keep up — and even get ahead.
Accessing the benefits of data-driven territory and quota planning
A sales strategy built on data and analysis offers some uniquely powerful advantages — even beyond the specific realm of quota and territory planning.
A truly connected planning solution brings the organization together, enhancing collaboration and solidifying goals across the company. These collateral benefits can take many shapes and deliver efficiencies in other departments as well.
Sales and finance teams are in better alignment when a solution to match revenue expectations and sales quotas is in place. Similarly, an efficient process for projecting and establishing quotas and territories allows all relevant stakeholders to participate. And a single source of data used across the company means avoiding problems with version control that often plague other businesses.
Anaplan: Connected solutions that support your business
Anaplan, recently named a leader in sales performance management by Gartner, offers a sales planning platform that prioritizes adaptability and insight through predictive insights, real-time collaboration and effective and continuous forecasting.
By utilizing the data your business generates and connecting it with systems for predictive insights and forecasting, your company can make informed and effective plans for the future.
Allitix, an Anaplan Gold Partner, offers services in four key areas to enable your organization to fully capitalize on this powerful offering:
Connected planning experience.
Customer engagement.
Technology enablement.
Strategy & operations.
We help your teams address and embrace the organizational changes needed to make the most of advanced business solutions, by providing wide-ranging support and a deep well of consultative experience and expertise. We address the technical aspects of successful implementation and use, plus educational and operational components.
A transformational change, like connecting territory and quota planning to the entire organization, can be especially complex for your business to navigate on its own. With the benefits it offers being so valuable and time-sensitive, a fast and successful start positions your company for long-term success.
The experts at Allitix are ready to assist you as you embark on this path toward more effective territory and quota planning.