What is a territory plan?

A territory plan is a strategic plan for how you set yourself up to achieve your sales quota. Before the internet, a territory plan would be defined by a geographical location. Today’s territory plans also include target industry vertical and target organisation size. Target organisation size is usually categorised into bands such as enterprise, mid sector and SMB.

You can build the foundations of a territory plan within 60 minutes. There are 3 essential parts you’ll need to consider: defining your target market, devising a strategy for lead generation and devising a strategy for advancing deals.

Step 1: Define your target market

Once you have understood your sales quota, your first consideration has to be the type of organisations you will target. If you are restricted to a geographic region, an industry vertical or an organisational size, this automatically reduces your addressable market, and helps you focus.

Analyse past success

If you’ve already started your sales job, think about what you have learnt from past deals across your team and make a list of what you would do differently. If you’re starting a new job, what can you learn from colleagues about the businesses that purchased your product or service. Is there a pattern? For example, if 3 insurance companies bought your product in the past 6 months, you can make the hypothesis that there is a demand for your solution within the insurance market. Given the insurance market is much bigger than 3 companies, it would likely be a good target market for retiring your sales quota.

However when looking at past wins within vertical markets, you should be careful to analyse the size of companies that bought your solution. For example, in the legal sector there are thousands of law firms, but only 5 make the magic circle list of most prestigious which are considered the industry heavyweight movers and shakers. The size of organisation is directly correlated with the amount of money it can invest in solving its problems.

Know your competition

Building a good territory plan means learning about your competition as it helps you understand why your market needs your product or service. Examine your competition and think about the reasons your customers would select your product instead. Ensure you analyse positioning, pricing and testimonials from notable customers. Do you have any stand out features your competitors don’t have? For example advanced data security features are usually high on the decision criteria within highly regulated industries like Financial Services.

Understand the sales collateral is available

Sales collateral is instrumental. It helps you open doors at the beginning of a sales cycle, and helps you progress your deals as you discover the buyer center for your product or service. Ensure you understand what collateral is available to you, including product data sheets, case studies and demo videos. Making this analysis helps you identify any gaps, and gives you the opportunity to focus on vertical markets with the most collateral.

• Datasheets help you understand the strengths of your product or services and how to position it. Marketing departments often tailor these to industry vertical connecting with trends and themes prevalent to that industry. If you’re focusing on a particular vertical be sure to check.

• Case studies move deals forward through external reinforcement from a well-known company or competitor. Case Studies provide social proof to buyers by showing them the pains of similar companies and how they’ve overcome similar challenges by using your solution.

• Demo videos are useful if you’re selling a complex solution as they help to visually communicate the solution. It’s sometimes hard to get technical evaluators together in the same room or call, so canned video demos can be a good alternative.

Step 2: Devise a strategy for lead generation

Once you know the size and industry type of the organisations you are targeting, you need to build a plan on how you will generate sales leads. Leads are the lifeblood of your sales pipeline. You need to keep the sales funnel topped up to ensure continued success.

Before you think about how you generate leads, think about how many leads you actually need to meet your sales quota. This will depend largely on the demand for your product within the marketplace. Start by looking at the win ratio across your peers and at historical sales data. When you know how many leads per month or per quarter you will need; you can explore routes and methods of generation.  

Self-generation

Self-generation is the quickest and most direct way to build your pipeline. As your pipeline scale-ups, you may find you have less time to dedicated, so whilst you do have time it’s a good idea to set yourself up for success. The more leads you put into the funnel now, the more you will have the chance of converting into closed business. The best salespeople in the world do their own prospecting, even with a healthy supply of leads through marketing efforts or a channel strategy.

You need a systematic approach to generating leads. Look for low hanging fruit. A warm conversation is always easier than a cold one. Can you upsell or cross sell to existing customers?

Think about past conversations or past customers from previous sales jobs. Use your network to drive meetings. In the first 2 months of your new role, you should spend at least 50% of your week prospecting. You should target booking 3 new meetings a week. As you pipeline builds some volume, look to dedicate a whole day to prospecting each week. Try not to book discovery or deal progression meetings on this day. Here are 10 rules of Sales Prospecting you should follow.

ADR Strategy

As an Account Executive you may have an Account Development Representative (ADR) assigned. These are sometimes called Business Development Representatives (BDRs). Work with your ADR or BDR to build a robust lead generation strategy. They often exist as part of the Marketing function and will be the first to receive inbound leads to qualify.

Set some targets on how many meetings are required, then work backwards to identify how many phone calls are needed to achieve those meetings. Share feedback from your own successes. Work on messaging together and be sure to include as many social proof points as possible from the sales collateral you’ve identified. Schedule a daily call with your ADR to talk through objections, what’s working and what’s not working.

Step 3: Devise a strategy for advancing deals

Once your territory plan has a working lead generation model, you need a plan on how you will convert leads into business to manage your year, quarter and month. You should aim to target 1x discovery meeting and 1x deal progression meeting a day.

Discovery meetings

A discovery meeting or exploratory meeting lets you and your prospective customer conclude whether there is a fit between the problem and the solution. The meeting usually lasts an hour and often takes the form of a presentation that allows a transparent and fluid Q&A.

The key to being successful in a discovery meeting is to ask good questions. If a customer is a the beginning of a buying cycle you quite often get limited information, but should be able to find a problem or pain. At a very minimum you should learn something about that customer’s strategic focus. To maximise the success of your discovery meeting use a Sales Qualification Framework. Finding out budget holder, decision maker and understanding the decision process are key to progress a deal.

Deal progression meetings

A deal progression meeting is a call after the initial discovery meeting where you progress an opportunity or deal by passing through the qualification stages of the sales cycle. There isn’t a set number of deal progression meeting any one opportunity should have, but the fewer you have, the shorter the sales cycle will be.

Each deal progression meeting should have a set agenda with the underlying objective of gaining commitments and flushing out objections. Your goal is to reach a Yes as soon as possible and may need several of these before you close a deal. Try to break down your sales process into technical validation and commercial validation.

These are some of the questions you must have answers for to reach a close.

• Does your solution technically meet the requirement?
• What criteria is your solution being evaluated against?
• What is the client’s process to evaluate it e.g. demo, trial, POC?
• Does the client have a budget for the solution?
• Do the budget holder(s) understand the problem and are they aligned to solve it?
• Who signs the order form?
• Who approves the PO?