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Getting the most out of the Territory Planning Solution Guide

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For many of us, a new year brings a moment to reflect and start things off with a clean slate. With Q4 earnings season already well underway, many businesses are looking at their go-to-market strategies and assessing what changes they can make today to help **** out their goals for the next fiscal year.

Anaplan experts have created a series of solution guides to help you get started. For this post, we aim to help users get the most out of our Territory Planning Solution Guide.

Using sales territory planning to ensure fair and optimal coverage

Creating and optimizing sales territories can mean much more than circling areas on a map. Territory planning involves carving up your selling universe in a way that helps drive sales growth over time. This can include many different factors depending on your business. Geography can certainly be an important factor — but so can customer size, industry or vertical, or product specialist and overlay roles.

In general, sales territories should be seen as fair to sellers, with opportunity spread equally across territory boundaries, while also helping leadership to make informed operational and personnel decisions.

Best practice steps that should be included in territory planning from a model building perspective

More mature organizations include the following processes when planning for and managing territories:

  1. Segmentation
    1. Identify high-yield categories of customers and prospects to increase sales revenue and retain existing accounts. Leverage Predictive Insights (PI) to help with assessing account scores and potential.
  2. Model market-condition scenarios
    1. View total market revenue “what-if” scenario results using calculated relative account value and adjustment options.
  3. Sales coverage planning
    1. Determine the ratio of account assignments where salespeople can make their quota while effectively providing the optimal service to accounts and prospects.
  4. Territory allocation
    1. Define territories based on location, accounts, products, sales potential, and any number of factors. Scoring derived by PI can provide a valuable input when creating these definitions.
  5. Territory assignment
    1. Assign sales reps and overlays to territories based on best fit and highest revenue potential.
    2. PI score, rank, and buying intents can be viewed when reviewing assignment with sales teams before signing off on the sales plan.
  6. Sales performance analysis
    1. Measure your sales progress over a period of time. Analysis allows you and your sales team to identify weaknesses in your sales strategy and make changes so that you can improve the results over the next period.

Be sure to check out the Territory Planning Solution Guide for common challenges, details on using Predictive Insights in Anaplan to augment your planning process, a full dashboard and demo flow, and more.

For more general background information on the solution guides, check out our discussion thread Unpacking the Sales Solution Guides with Anaplan’s own @PamWalker. 

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