Your sales territories are struggling. How can you boost performance without dampening morale?

Use dynamic resource allocation to align resources with market conditions and sales potential. Start by analyzing sales data and market trends to identify high-potential and underperforming areas. Segment territories accordingly, assigning more resources to high-potential zones and adjusting support in weaker areas. Implement flexible allocation models that adapt to changes in performance, and monitor results regularly to make data-driven adjustments. Invest in an analytics tools to automate and refine your resource distribution. This approach enhances sales efficiency and keeps morale high by aligning resources with opportunities.

The biggest mistake I see with territories is that they are implemented for structural reasons -- usually because it's an easy way to organize a sales function. But that can hamper selling. Sometimes drastically so. If there is a data-driven justification for using territories, then prove it to your team. Show how it is working for some people, and show how they are doing it.

Consider aligning away from territories altogether. In cases where the physical presence of a rep is important, then maybe territories make sense. In these cases, realigning the goals will likely help reinforce the necessity of the territory-based structure. In a lot of cases you will find that the company's goals having nothing to do with territories, and in those cases, this organizational mechanism is likely more of a hinderance than a helper.

If you want to train around territories, focus on the operational pieces that allow that structure to operate. Otherwise, territory based training will be largely useless unless you are operating on a global scale where there are major cultural on regulatory differences in your customer base.

Sales incentive comp, when properly built, increases Sales performance by an average of 22%, and has been shown to increase performance by as much as 44%. These numbers come from The Incentive Research Foundation and are easily searchable.

The best way to foster teamwork is to align incentives. If you need information to be shared, pay people in a way that makes them want to share it. This can happen at the rep level or the management level. If you incentivize solely on individual performance, your reps are going to look out for themselves only. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes bad.