The RevOps Rocket: Welcome to the Future of Revenue Operations

Welcome to the first edition of The RevOps Rocket, Territories.ai ’s newsletter covering all things Revenue Operations. This newsletter will delve into the latest trends in revenue operations, featuring commentary from thought leaders, insights on overcoming operational challenges, and exploring how technology is revolutionizing RevOps for sales, marketing, customer success, and revenue leaders.

The Birth of Territories.ai

For our inaugural edition, I wanted to share the story behind the founding of Territories.ai . The more I share this story, the more I realize we’re all facing the same challenges. Initially, I believed RevOps issues were confined to large organizations with complex processes. However, my experience with organizations both large and small has shown me that these challenges are universal.

I’ve spent nearly 20 years in sales, starting as a shoe salesperson at Sears in high school. For those who remember, Sears was once a retail giant. In retail, not all customers are created equal. On our sales floor, we always battled for the high-end female customers who wanted to try on expensive heels or knee-high boots. I knew nothing about heels, but I had vivid memories of my father’s Red Wing work boots from his industrial construction career. While my colleagues spent 30-40 minutes helping customers with fashion boots, I focused on learning everything I could about work boots and stayed in that section of the department.

My strategy paid off. While my colleagues sold $80 heels, I sold $150-$200 work boots in a fraction of the time. Within three months, I was averaging $18/hour with commission on a $5.25/hour base, while everyone else was closer to $9/hour. This taught me the value of focusing on customers with both a need and the cash to spend.

Today, organizations scramble to implement signal and intent-based sales technology, directing SDRs and AEs toward any online activity within their domain. Inbound-led outbound (yes, that’s a thing now) is transforming prospecting by focusing on the ~5% of buyers actively searching for solutions. But what about the 95% of the market that’s not actively looking or aware? Most of my B2B sales career was focused on identifying and selling on latent pain, and for those that know their customer, a newly realized problem can become an incredibly lucrative solution.

From Chaos to Structure in Sales Operations

Later in my career, I joined a rapidly growing SaaS company. Its sales operations strategy began as “here’s Salesforce access, prospect into any organization you’d like as long as another AE isn’t calling the same contact.” As we grew from 200 employees to hundreds more, we needed a structured, scalable solution for continued growth. After hosting Salesforce’s leadership team, we decided to replicate their territory plans. This year-long process culminated in a summer rollout, giving the sales team six months to transition to their new territories.

However, most sales reps focus only a few months ahead unless they’re working strategic accounts. By the time they engaged with the new territories in December and January, alarm bells rang. “These territories are terrible… I have no good accounts… who do I sell to in the Grand Rapids suburbs?” We went from consistently hitting quarterly goals to significant misses two quarters in a row.

Fast forward to a new RevOps manager, more data-driven decisions, and a revamped territory model, and that organization is now a case study for unicorn growth.

Scaling Sales Teams with Smart Territory Planning

If you’ve been in sales, especially in larger organizations, you have stories similar to mine. But these challenges also apply to smaller sales and revenue teams. Moving from founder-led sales to your initial sales hire, small team, first sales leader, and then a growing sales function involves many firsts. I’ve been through this process multiple times, both fortunately and unfortunately.

As your sales and customer success teams grow, starting with broad geographies or a fantasy draft of customer assignments works only to a point. As targets grow, it’s critical to focus teams on the right accounts with equitable territories. Proper account scoring, based on propensity to spend, enables revenue leaders to better understand and predict revenue growth. Account scoring is Step #1 in the territory planning process. Mistakes here lead to mistakes everywhere and eventual revenue misses.

With a team of 3-4 sales reps, you should have a strong understanding of your initial ICP and a handful of customers. As the team grows to 10, 12, and 15+, pointing teams and reps in the right direction and ensuring scalable quotas, goals, and territories becomes crucial. By the time you have a team of 25+, you’re already falling behind if you haven’t started implementing structure in your revenue processes. This is where capacity planning comes in.

Capacity Planning: Predicting and Optimizing Resources

Capacity modeling and planning predict and optimize the number of resources needed to meet future sales targets. By analyzing historical sales data, market trends, and business goals, you determine the optimal size and structure of your team. Effective capacity planning ensures you have the right number of sales and CS team members to achieve revenue goals, improve productivity, and maximize growth opportunities. This process directly impacts future revenue by aligning capabilities with market demand.?

With accurate accounts and a capacity plan, leaders can build territories for their teams. This annual process aligns current teams, new hires, ramping quotas, and predicted attrition to create ideal territories for the upcoming year to maximize revenue. This leads to more productive revenue teams, an improved focus on your ICP, and sellers targeting their best possible revenue-producing accounts.

The challenge is that these factors rarely align perfectly with the plan, and the laborious process from scoring to territory deployment seldom gets revisited before the next annual cycle unless something goes terribly wrong. In the current cycle of RevOps, high value accounts not being actively worked can lay dormant for 12 months until the next planning cycle, new insights about your ICP go unnoticed until accounts are rescored, and new competitor insights lay dormant.

The Future with Territories.ai

This is why we created Territories.ai : to solve GTM challenges arising from legacy processes. Our goal is to turn months of manual effort into minutes of work. Territories.ai helps that first sales leader make better account, hiring, and territory decisions before they have the budget and resources for RevOps. For larger organizations, we turn RevOps teams’ billions of data points into real-time insights about high value account activity, evolving ICP data, competitor insights based on win/loss data and more. Accounts and territories no longer have to be a painful process revisited once a year, they can be regularly reviewed, optimized, and adjusted to ensure every revenue team member is rowing in the same direction.

At Territories.ai , we democratize RevOps, helping every organization focus more on revenue outcomes and less on Excel files.

We’re excited to have you join us on this journey and appreciate your support in subscribing to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn !