Investment in the right tools we use for our job can save us from countless hours of stress and enable us to focus on the right things.
When it comes to sales, Salesforce Territory Management plays the role of a reliable tool. From account and territory management to lead and opportunity management, all the solutions are provided under one roof.
There’s a dearth of literature on how to use SalesForce territory management to benefit sales representatives and enhance revenue. We present you a brief overview of this highly coveted tool you can use to achieve the said results!
What is Salesforce Territory Management?
Before beginning with the main topic, it’s important that we start from the basics to be on the same page. Salesforce needs no introduction. It is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software that is used by more than 1,50,000 customers in the whole world.
The company has revolutionized the way sales takes place in the world and empowered the customers to serve customized solutions to their clients. The territory management service is a new feather in its cap where it seeks to organize the sales team in a way that boosts productivity.
It can also be described as an account sharing system that helps in easy structuring and sharing of data to take important business decisions.
How does it work?
Almost every business organization has divided its sales team on the basis of characteristics such as geographical area or customer group. The territory management tool also allows the business to assign different territories to the sales team based on the sales potential, geography, history, or combination of these factors.
It gets quite easy to know who’s assigned to work with which accounts, and it also gets easy to allocate work to the sales reps to achieve targets in a more transparent way. The old way of using spreadsheets and maps gets quite clumsy and this is where Salesforce has not only replaced them but also added several functionalities to make the work even easier.
Features of Salesforce Territory Management
Having given a brief intro, now it’s time to dig deeper into the several features.
- Ideal for all organization
Salesforce is used by all companies ranging from small ones to Fortune 500s. This is why it was imperative to build its functionality in such a way that Territory management can be used by companies with few sales representatives as efficiently as big companies. For example, ‘rule criteria’ allows users’ accounts to be named on the basis of their actual names. This feature is beneficial for small companies with few sales reps. However larger companies can do assignments by number as well due to the sheer size of sales reps.
- Role Hierarchy- Organize management relationship
The hierarchy at the workplace demands different information to be used by different people. For example, the VP of Sales may require an overview of figures pertaining to all sales reps, whereas a single sales rep may only need access to accounts within his/her territory.
The Role Hierarchy feature makes this possible as it prevents unnecessary data sharing and confines data to required people only. This contributes to security of data and also eliminates the duplication of resources and information.
- Analytics to provide accuracy and reporting
Performances need to be measured to incorporate further changes. In the present times, the analytics offered by several tools offer this functionality and it’s available in territory management tools too. While using the traditional softwares such as spreadsheets the major time of sales reps goes in arranging data to make some sense out of it, however using Salesforce such efforts are not needed to be put.
Further the crystal clear visualization of data allows getting a consolidated view of the performances.
- More customer satisfaction
As per research by Salesforce, 50% of the time spent by banking agents, relationship managers and insurance managers is spent on performing trivial tasks. Only 24% of the time is spent in actually interacting with customers to deepen the books of business.
This is why; it doesn’t come as surprising when customers complain about lack of satisfaction with the company and the sales representatives. In this case, if sales reps need to be divested from these trivial tasks, they could focus more on the actual work. Territory management tools allow this leeway.
In the same way, it also helps reps in playing to their strengths by assigning them the tasks they are thorough in. For example, a sales rep may be good at converting leads, then he/she should be shifted to roles requiring dealing with large clients instead of small ones.
Things to take care for while Creating Territory plan
- Effective allocation of resources
While using the analytics, you’ll realize that many sales reps are concentrated in some territory even when no apparent need exists. On the flipside, several territories might require infusion of sales reps to boost customer interactions. A proper analysis of such instances is required to efficiently allocate resources for reducing costs, lowering burnouts among the sales reps.
- Asking the relevant questions
Questions such as ‘what are the customers buying’, ‘which events lead to purchases’, ‘what are the bottlenecks in the purchasing cycle’ and others would help in better formulation of sales territory plans.
- Sandboxing
Many times it’s hard to be cent percent sure about how a strategy would roll out in actual implementation. Sandboxes can be pretty helpful in such situations. They provide a controlled environment where one can use real data to see how the strategies would play out.
Salesforce offers such sandboxes to customers based on the requirement. It’s important to use them for getting a clear picture.
Conclusion
We hope the above mentioned information was helpful in making you aware of Salesforce Territory Management. It’s important to take all the necessary actions before beginning with the assignment of sales territory to reps. At CEPTES, we help companies in leveraging Salesforce and Territory management tools to make the best out of their sales plans.
Reach out to us! We look forward to associating with you!
