Any manager or employee involved in outside sales knows the incredible joy of getting their territory right. It is simply tremendous to walk in the door of a prospective customer and know that your referrals are good, there are 30 more customers waiting for you down the street, and you have all the territory information you need to make a good pitch, from approach to close. The right territory mapping software puts your sales team in the right spot at the right time, so that these golden opportunities are maximized.
Headache Inducers
On the other hand, every outdoor salesperson has the experience under their belt of that one time they accidentally followed on the back of another team member from their company: territory gone wrong. Customers hate it, and sales people leave the approach at best feeling like grinning idiots, at worse, they are chased off the premises by irate customers who feel cheated.
The problem is not your employees, your management or your customers! The problem is your territory mapping system. In many sales territories, you have to divide up territories in high-traffic, highly populated areas where little more than a street will divide one high-performing sales rep from another.
Headache Reduction in 4 Steps
- Real Time Updates – Whether you are trying to close out a sales territory for a deadline, make room for incoming sales reps, or just adjust your system for market changes, you have to change assigned territories. It is part of the job. The right territory mapping software will do this automatically, preventing the data loss from sleepy eyed sales reps having to scan a list of prospects for the day and make their own maps.
- Integrate Data – Your sales team needs information to contact your customers, your customers need information to see the value in what you are offering. With so much information available online via governmental and social media websites, good territory mapping software will automatically include relevant and current demographic data.
- Manage Long Term Territories – For businesses setting up franchises, or seeking to establish long-term sales reps, the ability to virtually experiment with your territories is absolutely a prerequisite for establishing a territory. You can start with protected territories, knowing that the area you chose was large enough for growth.
- Reduce Stress Through Sharing – Any outdoor sales rep knows the experience of snipping images from their sales software into a presentation or document and then trying to show that to a reticent prospect. Modern software systems reduce the need for cutting, copying and pasting. Simply share a link to the relevant data and your prospect can pull it up on their own phone/tablet/computer.
Although the business of communicating to prospects will always have interpersonal issues involved, ensure that your sales team has the least amount of headaches possible with the right territory mapping software.
Here’s another article that you might like: Microsoft Can Teach Us A Lot About What Isn’t Needed In A Territory Mapping Software
