It’s a tough time to manage a sales team. Fewer reps are making quota, companies are adjusting targets, and buyer budgets are frozen. Sales leaders are tasked with squeezing every ounce of productivity they can from the teams they have now.
But some sales teams are thriving despite all this. How?
We’ve talked to hundreds of sales and revenue operations leaders and compiled a set of best practices from the teams that are thriving despite everything going on in the world around them right now.
Top-performing sales teams have a few things in common. They have comprehensive sales enablement programs, great coaching practices, clear rules of engagement, competitive compensation plans, and a winning sales culture. But they also share something else you might not expect - a modern approach to sales territories that enables them to be sure every rep is working the right accounts at the right time.
A majority of companies still design their territories with spreadsheets. But top-performing sales teams don’t use spreadsheets for territory assignments. They don’t use geographic territory models either. They take a more contemporary approach to territory design and use an adaptable, automated model called dynamic book management.
We compiled the best practices in place at the world’s top-performing B2B sales organizations in a free guide to a modern, high-performance approach to territories. You can download the guide here. Those best practices include:
- Insights into current account allocation and rep books. Top sales team management know the size of their addressable market, how much TAM coverage they have with their current sales quota capacity, the kinds and quantity of activities a rep can manage in a day or week, and more.
- Well-defined fit and timing criteria to determine a prospect account's potential, and the processes in place to surface those high-potential accounts quickly based on those signals.
- A "use it or lose" model of account ownership, where sales reps have to actively work accounts to keep them in their name. Otherwise, unworked accounts will be redistributed to reps with available capacity.
- Frequent account distributions and retrievals. High-performing sales teams use dynamic account allocation that regularly and frequently distributes new accounts to reps, as well as retrieves accounts from reps that are unworkable or worked to completion.
- Clear rules of engagement and SLAs. Everyone on the sales team needs to know and follow a clear set of rules of engagement, including who works what accounts when, what counts as "working" an account, and more.
- Continuous monitoring and reevaluation. The best sales and ops leaders are metrics-driven and know what data to look for, how to interpret that data, and when to make course corrections.
These best practices make up the dynamic book management approach to sales territories. Dynamic book management is a modern way of allocating accounts to sales reps. It continually matches available rep capacity with the best available accounts. It’s a flexible alternative to traditional sales territories that helps companies react more quickly to market changes and increase attainment. It's adaptable and automated and ensures every rep always has a balanced book of the highest-potential accounts available.
Get our free guide for more on how top sales teams use dynamic books and territory design as a powerful mechanism to increase attainment.
