Sales Team Optimisation

Sales Team Optimisation helps you improve the utilisation of your sales team to deliver better customer satisfaction and cost-effectively.

Global Location Intelligence

Sales Team Optimisation helps you achieve your goals

Running a sales team is a balancing act. You want to take advantage of market potential which means maximising coverage. But you also need to drive efficiencies, which means cutting waste. Sales Team Optimisation helps you achieve both goals with data-driven decision-making to mitigate human bias. While the sales territory mapping software adds increased rigour and accountability to territory planning and team activity, our consultancy service ensures that we maximise all opportunities, taking account of predicting future sales for all accounts plus accounting for workload and account visit frequency. That means improved team utilisation, higher customer satisfaction, and increased sales achieved more cost-effectively.

Taking our consultative approach, built from our learnings from undertaking multiple territory optimisation projects – together with our unique sales territory mapping software – we help align your internal and external sales force strategies. You will be able to target the right customers in optimised sales territories, maximise coverage, see where to recruit new headcount, and view current team base locations, applying workload calculations together with a host of other metrics.

Sales Team Optimisation helps you develop sales territories across your teams with clearly defined sales potential, by delivering all the facts and figures you need to set the right sales objectives and deploy your people effectively.

The system explores options in terms of:

Granular customer segmentation.
Improved market targeting.
Channel selection based on sales-potential.
Team activities based on sales-potential.
The right-sized sales team with an achievable workload.

When might you need it?

When your business expands or you want to increase sales with your current headcount.
When sales performance is patchy, stagnant & targets are routinely missed.
When salespeople leave, should you recruit, or redistribute the workload?
When recruiting where, and how, does that affect your territories?
When business is down, and you’re considering reducing field team size whilst maintaining effective coverage.
When HR need objective data to support your decisions and/or new competitors are entering the market.
When sales territories were created years ago and are no longer fit for purpose because customer segmentation is out of date or inaccurate.
When you have a new product or customer focus.
When you are merging with another company and are left with multiple territory boundaries and overlapping coverage.

Sales Team Optimisation - what are the results?

Data for decision-making. Well-balanced sales teams and territories to action those decisions. Tools to monitor the outcomes.

Customers & Sales

A focus on more profitable customers
Extended customer and prospect coverage
Rep-to-customer key account relationships preserved
Customers and prospects all allocated to a territory
Forecasting at both individual account and territory level

Team – more level playing field

Territories / Efficiency / Costs

Cost and revenue implications understood for each sales territory
More effective sales visits per rep per day
Easy allocation of leads with accurate territory postcode and zip code data
Customer allocations for each sales territory or service area
More efficient travel
Guidance on where geographically to recruit new team members
Identification of geographic areas needing a higher headcount to maximise new business opportunity

OUR 4 STEP APPROACH

STEP 1
STEP 2
STEP 3
STEP 4

STEP 1 - Sales Landscape Analysis

What is it?

The identification of critical changes if your sales or service team isn’t performing as you need it to.

Why is it important?

Benchmarking your current territory structure will give you the story of your team’s activity and outcomes. It will deliver the data for informed decision-making on the steps needed to optimise your sales team and territories to meet company targets.

What are the results?

Results are presented in a mix of mapping visualisations and charts & graphs & can be explored in-depth through filtering and zooming in Territory Runner.

Data Consolidation and Audit

The combining of all your relevant company data from many different systems into one data universe including customers, prospects, sales, territories.

Territory Runner

Build and configuration of a Territory Runner system. Loading of consolidated data for analysis, data visualisation and territory mapping.

Customer & Product Analysis

Understand if company targets are being met consistently by all the team.

Territory & Team Analysis

Understand team productivity, geographic coverage & sales performance

View, explore & compare by territory:

Customers

Territories

Sales targets and results
Sales by product group
Sales values split by accounts and prospects
Differentials in total travel distance to customers
Any geographic areas of low coverage
Sales team crossover into each other’s territories
Under or over-utilisation of the sales team
The ratio of suitably qualified salespeople to service specialist customers

STEP 2 - Opportunity Targeting

What is it?

Opportunity Targeting uses advanced data analytics to identify the accounts and prospects worth pursuing and those not worth your time.

Why is it important?

Get this right and sales will flourish, with more of the right kind of customers being visited each day. Get it wrong and your team will find their time eaten up by unsuitable prospects, distracting them from high-value opportunities making it harder to hit the target.

Common Barriers to Opportunity Targeting

Oversimplified customer segments derived solely from past sales value
Lack of definition and/or quantification around the elements making up customer classifications
Incomplete profiling resulting in customers in the wrong target segments
Duplicate customer records disguising what should be key accounts
Limited understanding of customer profitability and potential – not just based on historic trading, but also taking account of external factors influencing market sector growth
Insufficient data accuracy or completeness to support efficient sales and marketing planning

What are the results?

Customers who currently receive visits, but whose value doesn’t warrant the attention of your sales team, will be replaced with visits to accounts and prospects much more likely to buy. Customers who can easily be serviced by a less expensive method – such as telesales or email – are identified.

The right segmentation scheme also drives the workload calculations needed for your team to achieve targets. These underpin field force structures that will drive higher sales – the right people will be visited at the right time with the right offer.

Visualise and compare:

You’ll have:

Granular segmentation to identify accounts or prospects with the highest sales potential
Better prioritisation of sales visits, including a call frequency for every segment
Easier identification of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
Improved retention of high-value customers likely to defect to competitors
More effective marketing and promotions driven by precisely defined customer segments
Identification of low-spending customers whose profile indicates they may also spend with your competition

Results will determine the appropriate:

STEP 3 - Field Team Sizing & Scenario Modelling

What is it?

Determine the ideal size for your sales team considering current market challenges, team capacity, segmentation, sales channels and the resultant workload.

Why is it important?

Correct field team sizing ensures all customers and prospects receive appropriate coverage; the right mix of products are sold and the field force is stretched but not overworked. Underestimate your team size and you could be employing too few people and not servicing customers effectively. Overestimate it and your headcount could be too high – and people are expensive.

What are the results?

The right size team with an achievable workload to meet company objectives
Sales channels with the right balance between cost to serve the customer and profitability for each customer segment
A financially viable level of service for key accounts to prevent encroachment from competitors
The field force organised to deliver the product knowledge customers demand
The impact of proposed changes to the field sales force on sales support and marketing

STEP 4 - Sales Territory Alignment & Mapping

What is it?

The development of an ideal sales territory structure reflecting your company’s strategy, delivering on sales quotas, and effective for your team in the field.

Why is it important?

It sets the sales team up to meet company objectives with achievable targets and fair and equal sales potential and drive times.

How do we do it?

Based on the results from Steps 1-3, we design the agreed number of sales territories taking account of team bases, customer and prospect segments and locations, the road network, and rep-to-customer drivetimes.

Field Force Optimisation

All organisations have unique needs in this area. As such, we tailor each project and Territory Runner system to suit different data, varying circumstances and budgets.

How we helped 123SEND

“We knew that to ensure the success of our new field-based sales force, we needed a company that we could partner with and trust. Tech4T delivered everything that they promised (and more), they had the quality of approach and focus that made the whole process run smoothly and delivered everything on time and to budget. Graham and the team come highly recommended.”