Key Concepts / Prerequistes

Defining Territories

The first prerequisite of distributing accounts to reps is to determine whether you’re using territories, and if so have them tightly defined.

Let us start by saying that not every sales team needs territories. In fact, we strongly believe that the majority of sales teams (especially in the early stages) would benefit from not having them. The guiding principle behind creating territories is when matching a rep to a set of specific accounts has a positive impact on their performance.

Typical reasons behind territories:

• Geographical territories - when timezone, language or cultural elements have impact on reps ability to close the deal.

• Company size territories - when the sales process is significantly more complicated for larger than smaller companies and requires more experienced reps (think SMB, Midmarket & Enterprise).

• Product Lines Specialisation - when there’s multiple products and having reps specialise in one will result in better performance.

Unless evidence is strong that the above factors do have an impact on reps performance, we believe that territories cause more bad than good.

• The distribution isn’t fair because some territories inevitably will be of higher quality than others.

• Some high quality accounts might not be worked on due to the fact that territory isn’t fully "staffed" by the reps.

For the distribution purposes, if the territories exist they should be codified as a set of data based filters (i.e. Company Size → Employee Count / Revenue; Geography → Countries etc.)

Number of Accounts Per Sales Rep

The next prerequisites for account distribution is an understanding of the number of accounts you need to put in the hands of reps in order for them to be successful.

This is necessary for Named Accounts distribution but also quite important for Queue Based approach (although this should be more seen as a max number of accounts the rep can own rather than a number that will help them hit their goals).

There’s some rules of thumb on how to calculate it:

• Work backwards - what is the goal that the reps need to reach? What’s the historical conversion rate? For example, if each rep needs to book 20 meetings & the conversion rate is around 5% then they need 400 accounts.

• Account for disqualification rate - not every account that we will distribute is absolutely perfect. We should assume that there’s going to be a percentage of accounts that are not workable by reps. If we expect roughly 10% disqualification rate, then our original estimate should be around 450 accounts.

• Pad it - there’s usually not enough data to arrive at the exact number needed (and it will slightly vary rep by rep anyway). It is good to be safe than sorry so you should always add some accounts depending on your confidence in the above estimates. We found that anywhere between 10% - 30% is usually a good idea. If you feel like you might need more padding it’s probably good to use Queue approach instead.

Account Score (Prioritisation)

The easiest way to make any distribution a disaster is to distribute a random set of accounts.

This is a surefire way to loose confidence of the reps & have the sales team do their own prospecting. Any distribution should imply distributing highest priority accounts - see our guide on Scoring here.

Account Unassignment Rules

We’re strong proponents of the idea that each distribution should start with the clean up - removing accounts that are no longer worked on from reps names.

In order to do that we first need to define account removal rules to identify those (as well as to communicate with reps so they’re not surprised). The same set of rules should apply to future account redistributions.

The main data point we typically look at is Last Activity Date. For example any account that hasn’t been engaged with over the last 30 days is eligible for removal. The exact number of days you choose will depend on your sales process and how often you redistribute accounts.

Another data point you might be looking at are Disqualification Reasons. See notes below.

Salesforce note: due to how Salesforce is set up, the Last Activity Date is not available out of box (on accounts). You will need to create your own data point here. We typically see a roll up value from contacts used to achieve that. It is important that all activities are recorded against contacts in that case. If you’re using sequencing tools, we’d strongly recommend looking into integrating Activities. If this is still not available, you will have to rely on the reps marking which accounts they’re actively engaging with manually.

Account Distribution Eligibility Rules

Finally, you need to define which accounts are actually eligible for distribution. That’s usually different from Unassignment Rules because we don’t want exactly the same accounts to be redistributed each time (we want them to cool-off).

Last Activity of course has a big impact (and is usually higher than the threshold used for Removal - i.e. 60 or 90 days).

But there can be overriding factors:

• New contact (stakeholder) identified.

• Big increase in the Account Score.

• Intent Event (i.e. engaged with the company content, started hiring for specific roles, raised funding). That’s usually incorporated into the score to keep it simple.