Territory design
Territory design is the allocation of accounts to sellers such that each territory contains comparable attainable opportunity, not merely a comparable account count.
Balance must be measured in expected opportunity, a function of account fit, whitespace, existing penetration and historical conversion, rather than in account volume. Two territories with identical counts can differ by an order of magnitude in attainable revenue.
Design is also a change-control problem. Mid-year territory changes break attainment measurement, pipeline ownership and forecast continuity, so the release process matters as much as the allocation model.
Where it breaks
Territories are rebalanced mid-year without an ownership-transition rule, and in-flight pipeline is orphaned.
Related terms
- Coverage model
- A coverage model specifies how many accounts of what type each seller or team is responsible for, and what level of attention each account tier receives.
- Capacity planning
- Capacity planning derives how many productive selling resources are required to hit a revenue target, given ramp time, attrition, productivity and coverage assumptions.
- Routing
- Routing is the deterministic assignment of a record to an owner based on registered rules, segment, territory, coverage, and existing account relationship.
- Segmentation boundary
- A segmentation boundary is an enforced rule that assigns an account to exactly one segment and governs which motion, pricing and coverage model applies to it.
Field notes on this
- You just inherited RevOps. Start with a charter.
Being told to "own revenue operations" is not a mandate. Until authority is written down, every decision you make is reversible by whoever objects loudest.
- Why four teams report four different revenue numbers
A reconciliation problem may be definitional, technical, or both. Test the metric contract before buying another data platform.