People need to be set up for success which is why I came up with the eight great ways to organize sales people to ensure smooth selling. The first way is to set up a structure and organizational design. This begins with a five-step territory design approach.

  1. Analyze Potential. Use existing customer data to determine how much they currently spend. Then, to determine account level potential, apply the current spend to customer and prospect data.
  2. Rank Sales People. Begin by determining the current territory potential. Next determine how much revenue the sales rep should be able to attain. This allows you to determine the potential percentage penetration for each rep and territory. Finally, rank the sales people by the potential penetration percentages.
  3. Map Prospects and Customers to Territories. This is both science and art. Several factors go into the mapping process: account location based on headquarters location, account potential based on the current spend analysis, preferred industries, enterprise or business unit revenue cutoff, and account workload of the sales rep.
  4. Produce Territories. Each territory takes into account the following: prospect potential, customer potential, workload required, number of prospect accounts, and number of customer accounts.
  5. Review Territory Map. This is the opportunity to fine tune. Look at sales rep ranking vs. the potential of the territory and see if any moves are required. Then look at the list of the accounts the sales rep has and decide if you need to add or subtract. Look at the existing pipeline of the sales rep and the number and value of deals potentially taking place. Based on that make final adjustments and re-run the territory map.

For more tips on how to implement smooth selling techniques at your company check out my book.

Smooth Selling Forever enables small and mid-size business leaders to generate significant, predictable, and sustainable sales growth. Based in the science of selling, when applied correctly and managed vigilantly, smooth selling produces revenue results in a systematic fashion.