Lesson 10 - Learn Your Territory

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to assess and prioritize your assigned territory to focus on the accounts with the highest potential. We’ll discuss how to analyze key factors like account size, industry, and buying signals. Your assignment will involve creating a territory heatmap, categorizing your accounts into high, medium, and low priority.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn your territory. Now in the next few lessons, we're going to start talking about territory planning, account planning, account research, all of that good stuff. So we've done our elevator pitch, and now it's time to kind of dig into the tactics with your territory. You want to make time at the beginning of each quarter, a little bit before that actually, to really dig into your territory and understand and prioritize all of the accounts under your book a business. Now, territories might be categorized in different ways. You might have a geographical territory, you might have a functional or industry specific territory, but ultimately you will have a list of accounts that you are responsible for, and your goal with territory planning is to begin learning about these accounts. You're looking for trends. You're looking for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You're looking for different ways to prioritize your accounts and where you should start. So when it comes to your territory plan, this is something that should really be worked on with your manager, heavily involved right there. They're going to help you along the way. Your mentor can also help you. But you want this to be on a structured document. It can be in your CRM, it can be on a Google sheet or an Excel file, but you need this to be written down somewhere, right? This isn't something that you're you're doing in your head before we prioritize our accounts, though we're actually going to do that in the next lesson. What I want to do first is some territory research. So if you're not by a computer, just listen in and think about some of the ways that you're going to be able to do this. But ultimately, you need to learn a couple of things. First, what are the demographics of your territory? So if you have a geographical territory, especially, what are the types of accounts, what are the key industries that are prevalent in your territory? What are the personas you'll most likely be engaging with within your specific territory? Two, what are market trends, what's going on in your territory? So you need to keep abreast of like local local trends, industry specific trends, anything that can influence buying behavior. And then three, you want to look at historical sales data. So think about seasonality right review sales for sales performance from previous quarters, previous years, to identify patterns or opportunities for growth. Once you've written down kind of the high level, the types of accounts, the trends that you've seen, the demographics, the history of the territory, then you want to start creating your territory sales strategy. And the way that we're going to do this is by performing a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Let's start with strengths. So the first thing you need to understand, what are the internal attributes and resources that support successful outcomes in your territory? That can be that sounds a little vague, so let's let's get more specific. What advantages does your product or service have over the competition in this territory? Are there any geographic competitors that you're beating out? What are the strengths that you have there? What are the unique resources that you have access to? Maybe it's relationships with people in this territory. Maybe it's proprietary technology that you have that others don't What do others see as being your strengths in this territory market list all of the internal positive attributes. It doesn't necessarily have to be specific to your territory, but you really want to be thinking with your specific territory in mind, then you want to think about weaknesses. What are the internal limitations or deficiencies, the resources that you don't have, the capabilities or processes that could hinder your success? So you want to be asking yourself, what areas of my product strategy could be improved? What are the negative perceptions about my product or company within this market or this territory? Do I have any personal weaknesses in my own sales acumen, my own expertise that I want to overcome? Do I have all of the tools that I need to succeed in this territory, all of the certifications, all of the compliance requirements? We know that Europe has different compliance and security and privacy standards than the US, for example. So if you're in a European territory, you need to consider that. You need to be identifying all of the factors that could be holding you back in your territory. Then you want to think about opportunities, external, attractive, factors that represent reason. Decisions that your strategy could succeed. So thinking about any upcoming events, what, when you think about opportunities, it's like, what cool, what stuff is coming up that could help me is basically what you're thinking about. What are the upcoming events regulations? What are industry developments that could facilitate your growth? What are the emerging needs of your customers? If I were thinking about if I were in charge of technology customers, if that was my territory, I would be thinking about AI. I would be thinking about, you know, new trends that are developing. I would start pinpointing any external chances to increase market share in my territory. Threats is the last one right Swat, strength, weakness, opportunity, threats, external challenges that could cause trouble. This could be any competitors that have entered your market, any competitors that have entered your territory, or are specifically going after customers in your territory. Um, maybe your territory is going through a geographical economic downturn. Maybe there are changes in customer preferences. Maybe there's again, seasonality that is reducing your sales volumes. So you want to think about what are the obstacles, what are the threats that I'm facing here? So add all of these notes to your territory planning document. Use your strengths to maximize your opportunities. Use your strengths to minimize your threats. Improve your weaknesses by adopting new strategies or tools, basically, for your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and threats. There should be a second motion to this, which is like, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about your strengths? What are you going to do about your weaknesses? Are you going to leverage them? Are you going to improve on them? Are you going to accept them right when you think about your risks, what can you mitigate and what do you have to lean into? And how are you going to be able to speak to these things when they're brought up? So you need to be documenting all of these findings, you should also share your threats and your weaknesses with your manager and your sales enablement teams and your operations teams and your marketing teams, because they might be able to help you. They might be able to say, oh, that's actually not a threat for this reason, we can help you. Or actually, I think we can turn that weakness into a strength if we do XYZ. So you want to be bringing these things up proactively with your manager and with other teams. We're going to wait until next lesson to prioritize our accounts. So it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to research your territory. I want you to start a territory document that you're going to share with your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy, research the different attributes of your territory, perform a SWOT analysis to help you craft your sales strategy. And your study guide is going to help you with this every step of the way. I think I even provide a template, either in this lesson or the next lesson that you can use for this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota we'll see in the next one. Bye.