How to Build Lean, Profitable Sales Territories [Video]

Growing your brand locally can be exciting. There are plenty of opportunities to get local press, you get to collaborate with other local brands and retailers - but best of all, it’s all happening in your backyard, meaning YOU can to be involved as much as you want. If you’re a hands-on brand builder, that might mean working out partnerships with retailers, building eye-catching displays, and engaging with local shoppers yourself. You truly get to be the face of your brand.

But what happens when you land distribution in new markets and start selling in different cities and states? Of course that’s an important goal for your brand to chase and eventually accomplish, but it also means changing the way you do business.

While you may once have been able to represent your brand everywhere it had a shelf, the demands - and distance - of regional or national distribution give your sales team much more responsibility when it comes to representing your brand at major accounts and breaking into new, high-opportunity markets.

How to Build Lean, Profitable Sales Territories

Whether you’re a new manager or a tenured brand builder, there’s a lot of nuance that goes into making every territory not only profitable, but poised for growth.

To get right to the root of how to make every one of your territories lean and efficient, we talked to Dean Karrel, a sales coach with over 30 years of experience selling to retail chains and grocery stores. In the interview, he talks about the power of individualized coaching plans, his early meeting with Jeff Bezos, and how not to use technology in the field. Watch the video below!

Repsly: How has sales changed over the last decade?

Dean Karrel: I think throughout history, every sales manager would say this is the toughest period of our job, going through all the changes in the marketplace and what’s going on in our environment. And I think for all of us, no matter what industry we’re in, the word did change for us in 2008 and 2009 with the financial crisis. Whether you’re in auto, travel, publishing, food and beverage, you name it - in 2008 the world changed.

And since that time, all of our jobs as sales managers have much more pressure to hit numbers. While there’s always been pressure to hit numbers, the way we have to do it has changed. We’re expected to do it more profitably, to monitor our teams more, and to use technology differently. We’re all being forced to be leaner and meaner.  Again, we’ve always said things like that as sales managers, but it’s been especially true in the past 7-8 years.

Repsly: How can territory management aid in getting leaner and meaner?

Dean Karrel: One of our responsibilities as sales managers is to be blockers - to provide the blocking for our sales teams so they can go out and sell. That’s one of our key responsibilities. And in key account management, and territory management, our role as managers has to be to make our teams more efficient so they can spend more time in front of customers.

As we’ve gotten more sophisticated with more technology and more tools, sometimes we’re having our teams spend too much time on administration. But our sales teams are really at their best when they’re with our customers. So when we look at territory management, it’s all about how we come up with plans to ensure they can spend lots of time out in front of customers.

To achieve this, I believe in individual coaching plans for every individual. We all have our all stars (we wish every one of our sales team could be all stars, but candidly, they’re not.) So how can we get those B students and make them A students? I think that comes down to creating individual territory management plans tailored to each salesperson’s strengths.

Repsly: Once you’ve identified the strengths and weaknesses of your team members, what are some ways you can reorganize your territories to be more profitable and play to your team members’ strengths?

Dean Karrel: This goes back to chapter one for sales managers, but sometimes we forget it. You have to run with your winners. And your big accounts, your key accounts, those are the ones that are driving your revenue. As salespeople, we always say “we want to be able to handle everybody, to sell to everybody, and to work with everybody.” But i think it comes down to our big accounts and big customers, we have to give them the attention that they desire and deserve.

That doesn’t mean we don’t call on our medium-sized customers. But on Monday morning, we’ve gotta make sure we’re seeing our AAA accounts. I think that’s a big part of territory management and focusing on key accounts. It’s the activities, seeing what’s going on, and tracking everything along the sales pipeline.

Repsly: Once you’ve hit that organization and optimization step, what are some ways you can help your reps cover their territories and make their visits more efficiently on a day-to-day basis?

Dean Karrel: This goes back to how our business is changing. You take any industry over the last 5-10 years: when you look at the phrase "the sales pipeline," we typically talk with identifying an account, planning and preparation, making a presentation, negotiating, actually selling, and closing, I think that analysis of how we evaluate sales people all the way through the sales pipeline has become more critical - and I think that’s one of the initiatives for all of us in sales management positions.

I think the biggest change, though, in how we can help all of our sales people is with the technology that has come into play in the last 5-10 years.  When I started as a salesperson, we said “tracking the pipeline and stages,” but this was all tracked on primitive, rogue software. I remember my original account tracking was done with a software I bought at Staples. But now with CRMs, we’re able to have really sophisticated tracking. I think we need to give those tools to all of our salespeople. The trick, though, is to make sure they’re using them efficiently and effectively, and aren’t dragged down using them.

I think the whole technology piece for all of us in sales - in every industry - is going to make us more efficient and more profitable.