To conquer a battle, you first need a strategy. Sales territory management is no less than a battle. You need to predict your opponent’s move, fortify your positions to target the leads. However, as a sales territory manager, the most crucial element you need to look after is aligning your sales reps on the forefront. Who they shall target and how is of utmost priority.
Developing this entire strategy to acquire customers from scratch can be daunting. You can plan it on a whiteboard, but that’s absurd. You need a virtual set up to help you strategize. More likely, you need a tech-driven tool that gives you the power to see and visualize your territory and target customers. A Dynamics CRM Mapping tool can give you that power to manage your sales territory. Let’s see what more it can do to help you manage the territories.
Data Plotting
When a business expands, it becomes difficult to handle the growing number of customers and leads. You can’t keep managing by locating addresses manually. Calling out each and every customer is also not feasible. With numerous visits and leads to contact in a day, it’s challenging to tackle them in an adequate time.
As a result, you and your team end up wasting a lot of energy on non-productive work.
However, with a Dynamics 365 field mapping tool, you can plot your data on a map and filter it based on region, territory, proximity, and user. Based on it, you can plan your visits. For example, instead of visiting one lead from area A and another from area B, you can identify total visits in area A and reach them at once instead of multiple trips. The tool also suggests the shortest route. You can forward it to your on-field sales team to help them cover more in a short time.
Territory and Lead Allocation
As a sales manager, your first task is to allot tasks to your sales rep. Allocating the areas and leads manually can take up a lot of time. Perhaps, it might result in uneven territory distribution. Alternatively, you may overlap the territories while assigning them to your team members.
Dynamics CRM Mapping tool curbs it with features to create the territories and assign them to the team directly from the CRM. When you can view and cross-check the allocation, there’s no chance of repetition.
Performance Analysis
No plan is perfect. Even after implementing it, you need to be flexible. There would be ideas that won’t yield the results as planned. If you don’t analyze or track it, there’s no means of putting all these efforts into management.
Therefore, keep an eye on your sales reps’ performance over assigned territories. Analyze what’s working and what needs a re-work. Perhaps, you need to reassess the method of approaching or the timing for the sales push was off. You can do this by managing data in Excel, but you would be better off with a smart mapping tool. It not only has a powerful dashboard that shows all the sales activities, number of open leads, team performance, follow-ups, and more. Also, helps you plan your future strategies accordingly.
Communication
Staying updated with your team and every sales reps’ daily tasks is not easy. Neither you can expect them to keep you informed, nor can you keep calling everyone asking about their work status. It won’t only cost your time and calling budget, but also hamper efficiency.
Your team won’t focus on leads or simply they can’t if they have to notify their every movement to you. Instead, what if you can track their activities in real-time and stay updated about their check-ins and checkouts? There won’t be a miscommunication, and your team can focus on their work. Besides, live tracking will help you track your members’ whereabouts every moment. Next, you can instruct them to change or update the plans in run-time, which would eventually save their time in the end. Furthermore, you won’t have to wait until the end of the day to know about the targets achieved and work done. By tracking their ins and outs, time spent on meetings and custom events, you can analyze their performance.
Overall,
Sales territory management is not an easy task. You need the expertise to shape the territory management plan. However, tools like Dynamics CRM mapping can simplify the management process. With features like territory mapping, route optimization, advanced reporting, live tracking, you can be assured of already winning half the battle.
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Summary
Sales territory management is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, with the right tool, it is possible. Explore the different ways of managing it with the Dynamics CRM Mapping tool.