Dear SaaStr: How Should You Set Up Territories For Your First Few Sales Reps?
When in doubt — just start with round-robin, at least for in-bound leads. I.e., just route each new lead in order to the next rep.
The reason is less philosophical than practical. Some day, in the end, you are probably going to end up with territories, along with other types of segmentation (by vertical, by customer size — which you should do as early as practical, etc.). For better or worse, it’s just the way large sales teams manage themselves, with the possible exception of very high velocity, very small business sales.
But …
It’s incredibly time-consuming to manage in the early days
because …
The territories almost certainly won’t be “fair” in the beginning. If you sell to tech, you’re gonna give one rep the Bay Area, and the other one Florida?
So when in doubt, if you haven’t done it before, and don’t have a sales ops team 🙂
I suggest:
- start with round-robin (i.e., ratably route leads to each rep);
- then, segment your sales team by customer size as early as you can (specialize on S, M and L leads);
- then, “territorialize” only once you have the management in place to implement it.
More here:
(territory image from here)
