THE DATA STRATEGY BLUEPRINT SERIES

TERRITORY
MANAGEMENT
“…There are over 1000 ways to assign just ten accounts to two
salespeople. Since the problem grows exponentially with additional
accounts and sales people, one can imagine the challenge of aligning
any reasonable sized sales force. Frequently, the number of possible
alignments approaches the number of atoms in the universe.” THE DATA STRATEGY BLUEPRINT SERIES
– Andris A. Zoltner, Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University Building a structure to bear the load of a successful business
requires an intelligent plan. Structural plans start with a
In our first installment of the “The Data Strategy Blueprint Series” we talked about foundation and frame. Today that means solid, high-quality
the importance of establishing a structurally sound data quality foundation that data that strengthens the walls of the business, connects
sets the stage for growth through customer and prospect insights. power throughout the organization, and pipes in insights
about your customers and prospects.
Here we will build on that data quality foundation with the next step — territory
management: the process of aligning your sales team across your account and This series is focused on helping you design that blueprint,
prospect base. with guidance from the architecture experts at Data.com
and Dun & Bradstreet.
Territory management is a critical component of a successful sales strategy.
Incomplete data, sales team distrust of the quantity and quality of accounts in Data Strategy Blueprint Series, E-book 1:
their territory and lack of ongoing governance over your data and territory
management model itself can put cracks in your foundation. You risk missed
revenue opportunities, low customer satisfaction, sub-optimal market coverage,
inefficient use of valuable resources and disenchanted sales people with
misallocated territories who miss their goals. (Employee turnover is expensive!)

Like drawing the floor plan and allocating square footage, effectively mobilizing
your sales resources hinges on a territory management plan that carefully considers
your customer profiles by geography, industry and company size, up-sell and
cross-sell opportunities, online versus in-person buying behavior and your
current business footprint in tandem with goals for future expansion. DOWNLOAD THE E-BOOK

Read on to learn how, done right, a data-inspired territory management floor

plan will fill your company’s “house” with loyal customers, efficient and motivated
sales people and a funnel for profitable growth.
THE BLUEPRINT FOR
TERRITORY MANAGEMENT
1 SEGMENTATION MUST HAVES
Carve out informed segments just for your business

2 SIZE DOES MATTER

See the full scope of each customer relationship

3 4-CORNER ENGAGEMENT
Delight customers using teams, tools, data and process
SEGMENTATION
MUST HAVES
First things first. Establishing your territory management design means taking the
proper measurements to scale accounts and prospects across your sales resources.

Two primary factors will inform your calculations:

1. Customer Categorization
This is where your data quality foundation and governance is essential. If you’ve
established unified, updated and enriched customer profiles centralized in your
CRM application and grounded with the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S Number®, you
now have a path to definitively understand the makeup of your customer base.

Analyze, define and place customers into categories that make the most sense for your
business model. Look at your customers from different angles to form a robust and
comprehensive picture, including factors like company size, location, industry, revenue, buying
behavior; and choose prospects who share the characteristics of your best customers.

2. Sales Team Structure

In a perfect world, you would start with a clean slate and hire and allocate your
salespeople based on the current state of your business, customer portfolio
and plans for growth. In reality, you have to do your planning with an existing sales
team and rolling list of business objectives.

So with a customer segmentation analysis in hand, you can evaluate how well your
sales team is performing within the current territory management structure (i.e. field
vs. inside sales, hunter vs. farmer, industry specialists), identify resource gaps that
need to be filled and allocate opportunities equitably.

Taking the right measurements gives your sales team the space to thrive - accelerating
sales, delighting customers and driving profitable growth.

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SEGMENTATION MUST HAVES

BEST PRACTICES:

According to the article Divide and Conquer: The Art of Territory Management, figure how many fit in each and how many potential prospects
“To be most effective, a segmentation model must comprise two or exist, then you’ll be in the best position to activate a sales strategy to
more dimensions and integrate with a multi-channel strategy (to best allocate headcount, determine the right kind of sales expertise required
reach customers).” and assign quotas.

Analysis should be done at both a customer record and customer Here’s a checklist to help you carve out data-informed territories for
portfolio level. Once you identify the right customer segments, your business:

CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION:
CARVING
QUESTIONS TO ASK DATA FIELDS TO USE
DIMENSIONS
Identification How many unique businesses make up my customer base? D-U-N-S Number (to identify duplicate records)
What is the breakout of my customer base by industry?
SIC Code, SIC Description, NAICs Code, NAICs
Industry What lines of business are my customer involved with – and does it differ if they have
Description, D-U-N-S, Ultimate D-U-N-S
multiple locations?
What is the breakout of my customer base by geography?
Company Address, City, State, Postal Code, Province,
Where is each customer located as compared to the way we define geographic territories
Geography Country, FIPS MSA Code, Latitude, Longitude,
– locally, by state, regionally and globally.
D-U-N-S, Ultimate D-U-N-S
How many locations do they have and where are they?
What is the breakout of my customers by defined size? (for example, Small, Mid, Large)
Sales Volume, Employee Count (locally and at HQ),
Size How large is my customer, by revenue and number of employees?
Small Business Indicator
How do employees break out if they have multiple locations?
D-U-N-S, Parent or HQ Indicator, Subsidiary Indicator,
Is my customer a company that is a single location? Is it part of a larger corporate family
Corporate Family Domestic Ultimate Company Name + associated
tree?
Relationships D-U-N-S, Global Ultimate Company Name + associated
*More on this in the “Size Does Matter” section.
D-U-N-S, Number of Business Family Members
How many customers buy each of my products/services?
What is the average deal size by product/service?
What does each customer buy from me?
Buying Behavior How much does each customer spend? CRM: SKU Details, Avg. Deal Size, SKUs per Customer, etc.
What could each customer buy that they don’t today?
How do they buy? (online or through sales rep)
Cross reference these answers against customers by industry, size and geography.
Best New What are the characteristics of my best customers? Industry, Size, Geography, Buying Behavior, Market
Prospects How many non-customers exist that are similar to them across territories? Segmentation Clusters, Delinquency Risk
Sale Cycle Time How long does it take to close a sale by product/service or deal size? CRM: Oppty Creation date, Conversion date, Close date

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SEGMENTATION MUST HAVES

SALES SEGMENTATION:

CARVING
QUESTIONS TO ASK DATA FIELDS TO USE
DIMENSIONS
How many sales reps do I have in current defined territories?
Present Model CRM: Users by Territory, Users & Accounts Assigned
How many sales reps are in inside sales?
D-U-N-S Number to connect to customer account,
On average, how many accounts does each rep have – by location and sales model OR Revenue
Book of Business
Major/Named accounts?
Assigned Salesperson
SIC, NAICs
How many salespeople do I have assigned by vertical, or other expertise based on our
Specialty
product/services offerings.
Assigned Salesperson
Who are my top performers?
Rock Stars CRM: Revenue, Pipeline, Quota Attainment
How do I optimally mobilize top performers against our key accounts/goals for growth?

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SIZE DOES
MATTER
As part of our blueprint analogy, and in the case of territory management,
customers and prospects are like square footage. They each occupy a set
amount of space – in this context based on company size, location(s),
how much they buy from you today and what the potential is to win
more business. You need to make sure you plan enough space in your
territory management model for each customer.

Company size is more dimensional than just their annual revenue and
number of employees. It’s also about understanding if a company is a
single location, multi-location or part of a larger corporate family.

There’s a pretty good chance you’re doing business today with customers
who have a much larger corporate footprint than you realize. Understanding
how your active accounts fit within the scope of a larger corporate
“family tree” may uncover untapped up-sell and cross-sell growth
opportunities. Your current relationship can open doors to other places
in the broader organization, where you can close big deals you didn’t
even know were an option.

Gaining corporate family linkage visibility for a given account also helps
you benefit from efficiencies by reducing duplication of your resources
to service multiple locations that belong to the same larger business
entity. Assigning related accounts to the right rep, who has expertise
in that account’s business style, knows what product(s) are in use and
how to work within their purchasing structure, can streamline the sales
process and boost customer confidence.

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SIZE DOES MATTER

USE HIERARCHIES TO SEE WHITE SPACE

IN TERRITORIES
Every business location in the Dun & Bradstreet database is assigned
a D-U-N-S Number that stays with it through all the changes in its
business life. When locations are part of a larger corporate family
hierarchy based on legal ownership, they are connected by their
D-U-N-S Numbers. This linkage enables the construction of corporate
family trees – available to you through Data.com, including: the
site location; its direct headquarters or parent location; the highest
family member in that site location country; and the topmost global
company in the family tree.

When you have the D-U-N-S Number matched to your customer

records, you have visibility to their corporate linkage information.
This unparalleled way of seeing your customers’ size reveals white
space opportunities that will inform your territory management
considerations and the focus your sales teams employ as they
engage with existing customers.

Access to 250 million entities in Dun & Bradstreet’s global commercial

database and more than 4 million corporate family trees provides
a unique picture of an entire global organization across its related
entities, and lets you adequately manage the territory into which
these accounts fall.

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4-CORNER
ENGAGEMENT
Territory Management is a dynamic design activity that requires
accounting for multiple human, technology and data factors that
interact and influence each other constantly. When you harness the
power of those moving parts, you will have a living breathing territory
management strategy that is executed with precision and customized
to your business model for optimal engagement with your customers.

Like the old phrase, “Home is where the heart is,” in the simplest yet
purest terms, the role of territory management is to manifest customer
success. While customer success looks different for every company,
consistent outcomes do shine through:

• Reps are closer to their customers, can develop strong partnerships

and respond quickly to questions or problems

• Sales, service and implementation teams are optimized and

happy, making for better, more positive interactions and a better
customer experience

• Data and insights on customer trends are more readily accessible,

making it easier to respond with improved products, packaging
and pricing

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4 CORNER ENGAGEMENT

TERRITORY MANAGEMENT IN ACTION

Like the four corners in a room, there are four key engagement factors that connect a cohesive territory management plan, and make room
for customer success.

TEAMS TOOLS

• Perform segmentation analysis to assign headcount, determine • Use data cleansing tools (like Data.com Clean) to automatically
needed coverage (i.e. verticals, hunters, implementation update and enrich account data and enable strategic analysis and
expertise) and assign quotas segmentation
• Empower teams to collaborate and build plans for customer • Seamlessly add new account data to your system, giving your reps
success and sales goal achievement tools to easily search for and add contact and lead records from
• Share what’s working well across territories, including customer trusted sources (like Data.com Prospector)
wins and success stories resulting from team collaboration • Build territory-based forecast and sales reports and dashboards to
Results: Turnover is replaced with high morale and retention by measure pipeline, revenue and territory model effectiveness
sales members who feel they have a fair and equitable opportunity Results: Channel conflict dissolves as sales members focus on the right
to achieve goals accounts, with skills sets that match account complexity and needs

DATA PROCESS

• Unify, cleanse and enrich your internal customer data with • Establish scheduled territory management model reviews based
Dun & Bradstreet data in Salesforce using Data.com to guide on current customer segments and sales success and make
territory management evaluations for improvement
• Dig into the insights from reports and forecasts and take a • Build triggers for territory alignment monitoring and tweaking
data-driven approach to prioritizing time and effort guided by defined criteria
• Share knowledge derived from data and analytics across your • Continually maintain fresh quality data on your customers and
business, making it available to users assigned to specific accounts prospects with a defined data governance plan in place
Results: Slow sales growth transforms into growth opportunities Results: Cost of sales decreases as more time is spent selling and
revealed by new prospects in each territory who share similar attributes less time is spent figuring out who to sell to, maximizing customer
of your best customers “face time”

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 “Being able to understand and accurately assign
DOCUSIGN TAKES TERRITORY PLANNING
hierarchies is crucial to supporting our expansion
WORLDWIDE WITH DATA.COM
into global markets.”
When you’re DocuSign, the leader in digital transaction management, – Tiffany Munson, Director of Global Sales Operations
your market is everyone who needs to sign and send a document, or as DocuSign
they like to say, everyone on earth. As DocuSign expanded their operations
from North America to cover the global market, they realized they needed
to put the right system and processes in place that would support an
accurate view of all of their customers. That way, they could assign fair
territories to their sales reps to set them up for success across the globe.

Starting out, they didn’t have much structure to their data, which made
it “very difficult for us to plan our sales activities because we didn’t have
the entire addressable market, and that presented all kinds of challenges
for our sales team,” says Kristin Lucas, Sr. Business Analyst. “As the sales
team at DocuSign grew, we knew that we had to take action to ensure
that the data in our system was going to be accurate. And so we started
to look for solutions that would allow us to do this on a mass scale.”

With Salesforce and Data.com, DocuSign was able to make sense of

their data, including adding 200,000 accounts to Salesforce that had
previously been missing from their total addressable market. With a
deeper knowledge of their customers, including the hierarchy of each
organization, they were able to create fair sales territories and assign
the right customers to the right teams. Now, says Lucas, “we have a
very sophisticated segmentation model for our territories.” Using both
industry and geographical information supplied by Data.com, they’ve
created over 30 segments for their teams. With fair territories and all the
information a sales rep needs to close an account, DocuSign is ready to
conquer new markets across the globe.

SEE HOW DOCUSIGN CREATES TERRITORIES WITH DATA.COM.

WATCH NOW

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