This is part of a series we produced in tandem with Leslie Venetz. Checkout our previous post on AI in sales here or a video of our full conversation.

What is territory sales management exactly?

In January of this year, Leslie Venetz ran a poll on LinkedIn asking her audience what they most wanted to improve on. The results? In 2024, sales reps most wanted to improve on territory sales management. “Social selling” came in second, but territory management won out by a large margin.

Territory sales management, simply put, is a way of dividing up your geographic target market and efficiently lining up sales teams with those divisions. Using geography (e.g. area codes, major cities vs. rural areas, etc.) as the deciding factor on which sales rep gets which deals, you allow for faster routing and more accurate targeting. By divvying up your target market into geographic groupings, you can also get more specific on:

• The right sales reps to sell into those territories
• The sort of messaging or content that may resonate more in that territory
• The cultural nuances that may help sales people effectively connect with their targets in that territory

For example, Pod is headquartered in Montréal. If you were targeting someone at our organization, you would need to be mindful of language preference (say “bonjour!”), you could use the topic of hockey or winter as an icebreaker (get it?), or you could invite us out for a casual after work drink (aka the “5 à 7"). If you’re asking me? Try that last one (cheers!).

How should you approach territory management?

Venetz shared her perspective that while you can get away without very structured territory management, it can cause friction and issue over time.

Sure an individual SDR or AE can be given an account list for them to grind through, but going hard like that can lead to burn out or ruin the company’s reputation in territory.

Grinding that hard is going to lead the rep to burnout and it's going to burn the company's territory [in the process] - Leslie Venetz

The missing piece of the conversation? Venetz wants more sales teams to talk about strategic territory management and how the lack of it will correlate with a lack of results.

The first step is to acknowledge you aren’t doing an effective job at it and start to make change. This is most true for salespeople earlier in their career who may not have the experience to know better.

How to get strategic with territory sales management?

How can I segment accounts by geo or by industry? How can I figure out what social proof would work for this set of accounts or what triggers work? - Leslie Venetz

These are exactly the sort of questions you should be asking yourself and mapping out. Venetz suggests that sales leadership “gets obsessed with” burn rate and how they can work their territory.

One thing to avoid is the “boil the ocean” approach. Venetz advises executives to avoid speaking to “5,000 people” because at the end of the day you don’t “need to speak to every single person in your total addressable market (TAM)”. What’s actually needed is to “build in segmentation and speak to fewer people and speak to them in a way that actually matters to them”.

Another benefit to strategic territory management is that the same rep is talking to buyers. Instead of having a dozen reps “touching base” over 2 years, it’s a consistent person who can really build familiarity and relationships with buyers in that geography.

Using value-based segmentation for territory management

Venet’z preferred method of territory sales management is value-based segmentation.

This method involves starting with firmographic data, e.g. the sort of stuff you can filter in your CRM, a lead database, LinkedIn, etc. These data points can be very accurately and acutely mapped. Examples are industry, revenue size, employee count, where they are based (state, city), etc.

Venetz suggests stacking a few of these data points together to start to get your “territory”. The end goal could look something like:

Okay, now I am only speaking to CFOs in CPG and the food and beverage [industry] with employee counts over a thousand, but revenue only between 1 to 3 billion. - Leslie Venetz

This allows you to target with hyper-specific messaging, speaking either to the trends in the industry, how to increase profit from such high revenues, or how to optimize costs around their large headcount.

A final thought on personalization

One might expect that a big outcome of territory management is the ability to hyper-personalize (i.e. like the anecdote about Pod being Montreal-based!). While this can help break through the noise (amongst other benefits), it can actually be detrimental when you end up what Venetz calls “reading the news” back to your prospect.

Yes your prospect is aware they “are the CFO of a leading food & beverage company” or that they’ve just raised $X number of capital.

Venetz suggest you just cut to the chase. Connect the reason you are reaching out to what you can do for that individual (their business, etc.). Everyone is “busy”, so cutting to the chase and getting to it will help your prospect determine if they want to continue talking to you.

Conclusion

Territory sales management is something a lot of reps (of all experience levels) are thinking and talking about. As a sales organization grows and becomes more efficient, it is crucial to get organized and manage “sales patches” with some sort of agreed upon system.

Venetz suggests following her value-based segmentation method to get this done. If you’re curious to learn more about that, reach out to her and say hi!

If you're more curious about how to excel with your territory sales, check Pod out!