How To Begin Territory Planning & When Do You Need Value Management?

Intended audience: Sales Leaders or Account Executives who are new to an organization or changing their territory alignment within the same organization

How do we begin Territory Planning? The question seems simplistic but can be tricky since robust Territory Planning lays the foundation of successful Value Management adoption.

Below are some recommended steps for Territory Planning:

1. Assignment of accounts/territory – the allocation of accounts is usually organized by a RevOps team with direct input from Sales leaders

2. The Account Executive creates a spreadsheet or template containing Zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of an Ansoff Matrix.

   1. Zone 1: Upsell to existing customer in capacity e.g. additional users/subscriptions

   2. Zone 2: Cross-sell to existing customer e.g. new product/solution

   3. Zone 3: Selling a legacy solution to a new customer – e.g. on-premise licenses (versus SaaS licenses) – this may well be blank as there may be no legacy solutions/products to sell

   4. Zone 4: Selling a new solution to a new customer – net new client

3. ‘Zone 4’ can also be regarded as white space

4. Account Executives now need to prioritize top accounts in each zone to determine how best to optimize resources towards those accounts

5. Depending on the size of your organization and resources, this will determine how much Presales and extent of Value Management can be prioritized across the account base (# of Value Consultants to be hired, scale requirements etc.)

When do you require Value Management?

Once you have completed Territory Planning, your objective is to maximize critical success factors for your top accounts in each zone: Create Account Plans, Build Pipeline, Accelerate Opportunity Progression, Close Larger Deals Faster, Ensure Customers Renew and Grow. In approaching these next steps, keeping your customer business outcomes front and center (vs your product features) will enhance your probability of success and hence that is an opportune time to start adopting Value Management in your organization.

How do you get started with Value Management?

Learn from the experience of seasoned Value Consulting expert Anurag Goel in a forthcoming 10 part series as he distills down learnings from 4 times at starting/scaling Value Management at Salesforce, Adobe, Red Hat, SAP. Watch this space!