About this episode
Joel Arnold, VP of RevOps at Union Square Consulting, sits down with host Eddie Reynolds to tackle the critical topic of building better sales territories. Arnold brings years of expertise in revenue operations strategy, having spent the better part of a decade focused on how territory design directly impacts sales team efficiency and individual rep success. Territory management is one of the highest-impact yet most contentious issues in sales organizations, often determining whether reps succeed or struggle based on the accounts they inherit.
The core thesis is that territories should be built on data-driven account selection and capacity planning, not geography or ad-hoc sprawl. Most organizations default to geographic territories because it's easy to understand and historically made sense when reps visited customers in person. However, in today's inside sales environment, geography adds no value to the customer experience and often dilutes rep focus across incompatible verticals, company sizes, and buying behaviors. By instead using firmographic data, win-rate analysis, and a disciplined scoring model, RevOps teams can identify the accounts with the highest propensity to buy, balance deal sizes fairly across territories, and give reps a pre-researched contact list so they spend time selling, not hunting for data.
Arnold and Reynolds discuss what they call the three Ts of sales success: territory, timing, and talent. They emphasize that territory decisions cascade through the entire organization, affecting product strategy, marketing spend, and even which types of deals the company can realistically close. The episode covers the tactical mechanics of building territories: defining an ideal customer profile using sales team input plus data validation, calculating how many accounts a rep can genuinely touch based on go-to-market motion, tiering accounts into A's and B's that form the actual territories while marketing nurtures the rest, and finally, ensuring contact enrichment so reps open Salesforce to find a curated call list ready to research.
The conversation includes practical debate on whether RevOps should own the account profile scoring or sales reps should, how to balance data perfectionism with deployment speed, and why tools like ZoomInfo, Built With, and industry-specific data sources matter for scaling clean, accurate territory plans.
What we cover in this episode
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2:15
Why Territory Management Matters Territory design affects not just individual rep success but overall sales efficiency, win rates, and pipeline quality across the organization.
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4:30
Geography vs. Data-Driven Territories Shift from geographic-based territories to inside sales means geography no longer adds customer value and dilutes rep focus; data-driven approach aligns reps with high-propensity-to-buy accounts instead.
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11:45
Defining Ideal Customer Profile Start with sales team input on customer traits, test hypotheses against win-rate and deal-size data, isolate atypical variables that competitors overlook for competitive advantage.
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19:30
Data Enrichment and Quality Load accounts into CRM exhaustively, test data for accuracy and duplicates, use integration tools to refresh data regularly, prioritize clean data at launch over messy historical cleanup.
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27:45
Capacity Planning and Territory Size Territory size should reflect how many accounts a rep can genuinely cover given go-to-market motion, number of personas per account, and outreach cadence; balance account volume with opportunity value.
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35:00
A-B-C Tiering and Scoring Create scoring model assigning points to key variables, stratify into A's (top 10%), B's (next 20%), and C's; assign territories only from A's and B's to maximize propensity to buy and deal size balance.
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45:15
Contact Enrichment and Research Enrich top 30% of accounts with persona-specific contact details, phone, email, LinkedIn, and industry-specific research links so reps have a curated call list ready to research before outreach.
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55:30
Rollout, Enablement, and Guardrails Transition reps from old territories to new ones carefully, use enablement sessions to explain the why, set account-creation guardrails to prevent future sprawl, and monitor adoption with leadership buy-in.
The lines worth sharing
So much selling time is wasted on the wrong prospects. We constantly see fighting on the team over territories and accounts.
Eddie Reynolds · 1:30
Territory management is one of the biggest topics that affects the most number of people in the sales team and beyond. It can make or break certain people.
Joel Arnold · 2:30
Common sense is not common practice. It's a lot easier to just say divide the territories up by geography because that's always what we've always done.
Joel Arnold · 7:00
If you're bouncing between one different vertical and another from one large company to a small company, you can't learn anything about the customers you're serving.
Eddie Reynolds · 4:45
Common questions from this episode
Why should we move away from geographic territories?
Geography made sense when sales reps visited customers in person, but inside sales via Zoom eliminates that benefit. Geographic territories often force reps across incompatible verticals and company sizes, diluting focus and preventing consistent messaging. Data-driven territories maximize propensity to buy and rep efficiency.
How do we define which accounts are ideal for our business?
Start by interviewing sales reps and managers on customer traits, then test those hypotheses against historical win rates and deal sizes. Look for atypical variables your competitors overlook. Use correlation or regression analysis on past customer data to validate which firmographic factors truly drive higher close rates and larger deals.
What size should a territory be?
Territory size depends on your go-to-market motion. Calculate how many accounts a rep can genuinely cover based on number of personas per account, outreach cadence, and call volume. Factor in desired deal-size balance so all reps have fair opportunity. Include buffer accounts for refresh and new hire ramp.
Should RevOps or sales reps own account prioritization?
RevOps should own the account profile scoring and define A and B tier accounts based on data. Sales reps then own tactical prioritization within those tiers, choosing which A or B accounts to focus on based on contract renewal timing and deeper customer knowledge. This separates data-driven filtering from sales judgment.
What data sources should we use for firmographic enrichment?
ZoomInfo is the generalist default for firmographic data. Built With covers technographic information. Industry-specific tools like CoStar work for real estate. Validate data against known customers first, use G2 to find category-specific vendors, and consider layering sources for completeness. LinkedIn is useful for contact research but less ideal for initial company discovery.
How do we avoid duplicates and bad data when launching territories?
Get accounts into Salesforce as clean as possible at launch. Test data quality by spot-checking against known customers. Use deduplication tools to identify definite or potential duplicates. Once live, prevent future sprawl by restricting account creation to RevOps or BDRs rather than individual sales reps. Integrate data refresh feeds from enrichment vendors monthly or weekly.
SEO meta description
Joel Arnold, VP of RevOps at Union Square Consulting, reveals how to build data-driven sales territories that maximize efficiency, reduce fighting, and align reps with high-propensity-to-buy accounts.
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sales territory management
Joel Arnold RevOps
account scoring model
ideal customer profile ICP
capacity planning sales teams
data enrichment ZoomInfo
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firmographic data
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Read the full transcript · 61 KB
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Welcome to RevOps Live number 19 on territory planning.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo much selling time is wasted on the wrong prospects. We constantly see fighting on the team over territories and accounts. How can we make the whole team more efficient and more effective? We're going to dive into that today. I have our VP of RevOps, Joel Arnold, to help guide us through this topic. Joel, why should people listen today? Yeah, because territory management is one of the
OTHER GUESTbiggest topics that affects the most number of people in the sales team and beyond. It can make
OTHER GUESTor break certain people, you know, having a good territory or not. So it's always a contentious
OTHER GUESTpoint. It always goes with a lot of moving pieces. And I think it's really important for a lot of people. I couldn't agree more. When I worked at Salesforce, we used to always talk about success
EDDIE REYNOLDSbeing contingent upon the three Ts, territory, timing, and talent. One could argue that the timing is reflective of the territory as well. And I bet we'll get into that today. I'm excited to dive in. As always, we have Sarah Ra, our event producer, manning the controls here. Sarah, thank you for helping us out and running this event as always. Hello, everyone. Welcome. So if you're not familiar with us, we're a revenue operations consulting firm. We work with early and mid-stage B2B SaaS startups. We help them build out all things revenue operations. We do this event every single week, usually on Wednesdays at noon. Today's an exception because I was traveling yesterday. We record this and post it to the podcast. You guys can access that on our website. We will also announce that via our newsletter. We're going to stop announcing it via email because we're worried people are getting too many emails from us. So if you want to get an email reminder,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou can go to our website and sign up for the newsletter. Sarah is going to share the links there. And Sarah, if you haven't shared the link for the newsletter, make sure to add that in there. And then that newsletter comes out on Fridays. Everything that we do in terms of our social
EDDIE REYNOLDSmedia can be accessed on our website, unionsquareconsulting.com. Without further ado, Joel and I are going to dive into this topic. He's going to talk through a number of talking points. I'm going to ask some questions and add my own commentary. We'll encourage you guys in the audience to ask your questions. Send it in the chat. We'll call on you when we have an opportunity. You can jump on video and ask your question and we'll do our best to answer it. And without further ado, Joel, do you want to kick us off?
OTHER GUESTYeah, happy to. I've been talking sales territories for, gosh, the better part of a decade at this point. And beyond the fact that it can make or break somebody's year to get a good or a bad territory. And if you talk to salespeople, they're always arguing over whether or not they have a good enough territory versus the person sitting next to them. But also a lot of things are changing right now with territory management. So one of the biggest things that we've seen over the last five years, I would say, and especially through the pandemic is the transition from geography-based territories where you're getting in a car or getting on an airplane and you're going to go visit your customers in person to more of an inside sales approach. And for lack of a better term, the Zoom approach to sales engagement. So that's a very big thing that's shifting at the moment. And so beyond that, I personally think that there's just a better way as well. I mean, even if you still do use geography to drive your sales process, there's a lot of people that still get on the road. I still think that geography is kind of a bad way on its own of dividing up sales territories. I think there's a more scientific approach to it. And then today I'd like to get into how very tactically
OTHER GUESTwe go about generating sales territories and then applying it to the team.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's great. I completely agree. I mean, like I've spent a long time in sales. I still do all our sales here at Union Square Consulting. And having a geographic territory can make sense in terms of just trying to visit customers, but it doesn't really add any value to the customer themselves. So if you're bouncing between one different vertical and another from one large company to a small company, et cetera, depending on how big the company you're working for is, you might not have territories divided by size. It's really difficult to get consistent messaging to that prospect that will resonate with them because your spread is so thin. You can't learn anything about the customers or the prospects that you're serving. It's nice when you're booking airline flights, but if we're doing all of our calls over Zoom, what's the point? So as I said, I'm anxious to dive into this with you. I guess my first question though, Joel is like, based on what you've seen, why do you think experienced revenue leaders, VPs of sales and CROs don't already get this?
SPEAKER_18I think they get it. I just don't necessarily think they know how to take it down to the ground.
OTHER GUESTI mean, in typical fashion, common sense is not common practice, right? So while this, I think, intuitively makes sense to anybody you'll bring the topic up with, it's a lot easier to just say, we've got the accounting system, what we have right now, go call all of them or divide the territories up by New England and Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast, because that's always what we've always done. I don't know. There's a lot of great reasons for it. I don't think people push back. I think people are just like, okay, what exactly do I do with this? It's really, really difficult sometimes, but starting off and getting the buy-in of the people at the top end of the stack are, well, that's a really good first step.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I think it's another thing is, you know, if you are a CEO or a CRO or a VP of sales, you've got so much on your plate. You may not have the opportunity to overanalyze something like
EDDIE REYNOLDSterritory assignment, and you might realize it's not perfect, but really need to delegate to that to somebody else in revenue operations or sales operations, or sometimes it's somebody in neither. And they may just not have the skillset or the experience and everybody's moving so fast. And you end up with a sales rep that has a really poorly designed territory that doesn't set that rep up or the team overall up for success.
SPEAKER_10Or you don't have territories really at all. What I've seen a couple of times is where you go into
OTHER GUESTan account and people will say, Hey, I've got, I don't know, the Northeast. Okay, great. There's a company in the Northeast that has a factory. That company also has a factory in Atlanta. The person in Atlanta goes out to the same account. It's gets all confusing. No one's sure quite who owns that account. And then suddenly a fight ensues. So, you know, there's a lot of what people do today is very organic. They kind of add accounts as they go. They allow their reps to sort of add accounts. And if it's in your geography or if it's in your industry, by your own personal judgment, well, then that can be in your territory. You just go ahead and add it and let's go. So it can be fairly loosey goosey. And what I'm suggesting is, you know, shuffling accounts and building territories and sort of growing is a really good thing. You want to keep those things refreshed, but you need to have
OTHER GUESTrules of engagement and you need to have guidelines as well as optimizing the territories that you're delivering to your reps. Yeah. And that's really important for two simple reasons. Number one, all
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe fighting, you're taking selling time away from your reps and also coaching and time closing deals
EDDIE REYNOLDSaway from sales leadership. It's just a massively inefficient thing to have as part of your sales process. And then secondly, you're not targeting the best prospects. I know you and I are going to get into a healthy debate on this later, but I'm going to say, I agree with you that sales reps should not be left to design, you know, their own territories and prioritize all their prospects completely by themselves. Usually what happens is that salespeople and all the selling time that we're spending so much money as an organization to have is being invested into the wrong prospects. We're not calling the best people with the best messaging. So we're not building the most pipeline and closing the most business that we can. Yeah. This, that is why this is one of the biggest levers that you can use to drive
SPEAKER_04efficiency across the board in your sales team. Uh, first, because as you mentioned before, a lot of
OTHER GUESTtime is wasted, just fine, trying to find the right prospects and reaching out to them, but also a lot of time is wasted reaching out to the wrong ones. Um, and so it takes a long time. If you don't provide your reps with quality list of accounts to go after for them to go tease through all of it and figure out who the right ones are, get them added to the CRM, go find phone numbers for people, et cetera, et cetera. So part of this goes along with the data enrichment story, um, and, and the efficiency that you can drive
OTHER GUESTfrom that. But a lot of this is just like, if you just weed out the garbage, what's left over is inherently going to be better and a, and a better use of, of everyone's time. You'll see, you should see if
OTHER GUESTthis works right, you should see an improvement in your CAC almost immediately. And it's like acronym there, uh, cost required customer. It should be cheaper to acquire customers. If you're using, uh, this approach. Oh man. I almost let an acronym slide by glad you caught that. I didn't. Well,
EDDIE REYNOLDStell us more about data and I'll just say before you dive in, I completely agree with you. It's really
EDDIE REYNOLDSsimple. If you think about the mathematics that goes into sales, the effectiveness of your messaging, your ability to create pipeline and close pipeline, all the skills in the world don't help you if you're calling the wrong prospect. Yeah. And, and what we're trying to isolate here is a propensity to
OTHER GUESTbuy, but that could be, you know, different at different stages in the funnel. So I'll give you an example. If you're a high propensity to buy at the negotiation stage, well, that's very straightforward. Okay. They're likely to sign the contract. Great. But what is likelihood to buy look like in the lead stages of the funnel in the prospecting stages of the funnel? Well, it's really those conversion points between those different early stages and later stages there. So just mathematically, if you double the conversion rate from outreach to response, then you double the out, double the win rate on average between outreach and closed deal. And so you, you get a lot of
OTHER GUESTefficiency by just moving the needle a little bit in the earliest stages of the funnel that results in higher win rates later. A hundred percent. We've got a question from the audience and Sarah,
SPEAKER_21thank you for calling that out. Cause I missed it. Mike, would you like to jump on camera and ask a
EDDIE REYNOLDSquestion? Yeah, sure. And I'll just say, thanks for letting me in. I've never joined one of these
OTHER GUESTbefore. Um, yeah, thanks. So we're, we, uh, we're territory planning historically set in our company within the sales managers themselves. And then they would figure out amongst the reps, like who gets what? And we've done both geographical ones or industry-based ones. But I was wondering, we've, we've also played with different suppliers for this data enrichment or for the firmographic information. If there was kind of an opinion, we're kind of in an active debate internally now about if people had experience good or bad with some of those, where we should try to get the accurate firmographic information. I put in a couple of the, in the consideration set, but I know there's more.
SPEAKER_31Yeah. Yeah. Um, a lot of it can be industry specific. If you're looking at office buildings,
OTHER GUESTwhatever, like a co-star would be really great. That won't apply to a lot of people. The classic ones that are, um, you know, built with is really good for technographic information. Uh, zoom info is sort of the classic generalist data source for things like firmographic information. Um, but there's a lot of, a lot of good tools out there. I usually, when I'm looking at this, I go to G2 and just search, uh, different size companies, depending on industries, et cetera. They do a pretty good job of kind of guiding you there. Um, I don't know, Eddie, do you have any pointers there? I do, but like, I'll be honest with you. Like this is coming from like when I used
SPEAKER_00to sell this stuff. So you can keep me honest here, Joel, and tell me if this is VS, but what I would always tell people is take a sample set of data. So find some customers,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou have some prospects that, you know, the data on, and then think through like, what data points do I need in order to identify more companies like this? And how does that compare to the data set that I can get as I'm evaluating this tool? So you take it to zoom info, for example, a zoom info, giving you the data points that you need. And B is it in line mostly with the data that
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou already have such that you can, you can trust it. I think what Joel said about industry is really
EDDIE REYNOLDSimportant. CoStar is one that's really common in commercial real estate. I worked in private equity venture capital before I got into, into tech about 10 years ago. And like, we needed to know, like if an investor had a certain amount of assets under management, you're not going to get that out of zoom info. Um, so you would use tools like prequel or pitch book. Um, so it's really got to be specific to the data points that you need to identify the right, right prospects.
SPEAKER_35Okay, cool. And then the other one was like, uh, you know, we, we have, we have a few hundred sales reps that use, um, LinkedIn sales navigator to find the people to target and, you know, then they're
OTHER GUESTmoving that into a cadence or a flow or whatever for our outreach. So LinkedIn now has this LinkedIn sales insights where they're kind of trying to elbow their way into this space. And we, we've been pitched it and I just didn't know if anyone had any direct experience with it. So it looks, it looks cool. And I know that we are kind of dependent on that company already for our sales navigator for people finding. So it seems kind of like, well, we should look at if, if that's maybe where we should also do our company finding, but, um, anyway, we're kind of still in the exploratory stages.
SPEAKER_10I would do the exploratory, uh, compare and contrast. And we're going to talk about isolating the
OTHER GUESTvariables for you that matter, because that's really is what your territory management should be built upon. So as Eddie's mentioning, you know, figure out the things that matter for you and your business and somebody that, you know, the data for get a sample set of those together, and then look at a couple of different tools and see what has what and what looks to be more accurate than, than which. And you also don't have to rely on just one data source. So you think about it, you might use
EDDIE REYNOLDSone source to find, you know, all the companies or all the companies that fit certain criteria and then sort of maybe, you know, cross-reference that with your proprietary data or a secondary tool set that can help you narrow it even further and, or give you like the information you need for the contacts within the organization or LinkedIn is a really great example of that. Like oftentimes you can get a lot of really rich intelligence inside of LinkedIn, but it may or may not be the best tool to find the company to start with. Cause oftentimes the way that like LinkedIn classifies
EDDIE REYNOLDScompanies is not super sophisticated. Yeah. Thanks guys. That's helpful. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_38Awesome. And Joel, you want to dive deeper into data here?
OTHER GUESTYeah. Yeah. So unfortunately in revenue operations, or fortunately a lot of it always comes back to data as a starting point. Um, and this is no difference, but, uh, what we're trying to do is combine anecdotal or qualitative information with, with hard and fact based data points. So prevents any to buy or likelihood to buy is really what we're trying to get to. And you want to prioritize all the accounts in your entire universe by that fact. So that's really what we're trying to do, where we're trying to get to at the end of the day, if something has a bigger likelihood to sell, or if it's going to sell at a much larger price point, those are two things that, uh, kind of go into, go into that. So where do you, where do you begin? I think, okay, we want to, we want to sell a lot of stuff. That's, that's intuitive, but where do you begin with that? Well, I would say start off by like talking to your reps. Usually they've been selling for a bit of time. Uh, your managers know what, what a good account looks like, like start there as your hypothesis or sort of your baseline. If they say bigger, bigger accounts is better. Well, it's great. There's probably a limit to that. A lot of companies, uh, smaller early stage companies are who we target. Maybe it's different industries. Maybe there are certain identification points that are unique to your industry. That might be really important, but it's good to just kind of get those down on paper. What you're trying to look for though, is something that's atypical. So if you are in a market with more than one competitor, I promise you that they're looking at similar things that, that what you're going to come up with it in your first four or five variables, um, bigger accounts, the better. That's not, that's not
OTHER GUESTanything new. That's not rocket science. However, um, maybe you're a better fit for customers that have this one unique thing that your, your competitors don't. Um, and so this is going to be a competitive advantage to you is to take some time and really think about this and isolate. Like what are those unique idiosyncratic things that make a customer ideal for me, um, that other people won't intuitively
OTHER GUESTexpect.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJoel, it's interesting. You mentioned that I was, I saw a post on LinkedIn right before I jumped into this, um, by Scott Lease, who's a phenomenally intelligent sales leader. And he said, you know,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhen I'm talking to most founders, I say, the first thing you need to do is narrow your ICP, get super laser focused. Right. And I thought our conversation is probably going to end up touching on ICP a lot because that's ultimately where territories are built from. Could you share a little bit more about this? Or I can too on how important it is to narrow your ICP, how you do that and why? Yeah. So importance, how, and why? So it's, it is incredibly important to narrow your ICP.
OTHER GUESTUm, otherwise you're just trying to talk to anybody and hope that anybody will buy your product. Um, if you have a product market fit, um, then you have a product and you have a market, uh, and they fit, uh, that market is essentially your ICP. Um, so I know that's a little simplistic, but, um, it's not everybody want your product. In fact, the more focused you can be on the people that you need to go talk to who will buy your product, the more efficient you'll be with your time and the more successful you'll be as a company. I think that bit isn't too.
OTHER GUESTThe how is a little bit more difficult. Um, so you're initially going to have a set of customers that your organization starts with. You'll have a general sense of the pain, uh, that people are feeling in a particular market and your product is going to be designed to, to fit whatever need that presents. Um, but, um, what you need to do is not stop there. Um, the how is more about like, how do you set up something that monitors that on a continuous basis? And there are some, um, you know, it's, it's very difficult to measure that specifically being able to be able to measure
OTHER GUESTsome things around it. So if you have a really strong product market fit, your wind rates will, uh, and price points will stay maintained or elevated. If you notice that your, uh, price point
OTHER GUESTcontinuously weakens, my guess is that you're not serving or providing as much value to people as you were before, or maybe there's a new entrant in the market that's undercutting you. And so you'll just start to see weakness in a lot of sales metrics. Um, and you might just see weakness in earlier stage,
OTHER GUESTlike late funnel metrics around, um, maybe you're getting to that stage in the funnel, uh, around consideration or I guess basically the point where someone wants to talk to a salesperson, maybe you're seeing a fall off in that. And that could also come from a weakness in, in your focus on ICP or that the ICP is sort of
OTHER GUESTmoving away from you and your product set. Yeah. Does that make sense? I agree with you here. I would just
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay, I think it does make sense. I would say, I see it differently when you see, I think that this is common sense. Having worked as a sales rep for so long and so many sales organizations, I think there is this natural inclination for anybody that's in sales or leadership to want to cast the widest net possible thinking like, well, if we're not capturing that we're losing opportunity. And the reality is, is that every single prospect, I don't care how narrow you, you define your ICP, every single prospect is different and they're going to need different things from you. And so the more that you're stretching, Oh, okay. Like this is an enterprise account and this is an SMB account. This is in this industry and that's in that industry, or they're in the same industry, but they're in two different verticals. You need to every step in your sales process needs some customization in order to win that customer over. And so you end up stretching yourself so thin that you as a company and each of your individual sales reps are just far less effective as opposed to just saying, and I know we're going to get into capacity planning here, but how many accounts can we cover to begin with? And if we figure that out, what is the narrowest possible definition of who we should be covering so that we can focus all of our energies as an organization and not just sales, but think about enablement, think about product, everything into that. Your classic example of deviating away from this is every startup that starts an SMB and then says, we need to go enterprise. And they think, let's just hire an enterprise rep and start making calls. And that never works because enterprise customers need a completely different buying process. They oftentimes need a different product. You think about like the security that you need in an enterprise product that SMBs often do not require in order to purchase. And you have to plan out your entire go-to-market strategy differently to tackle that market than you do SMB. The other classic example is when we're, you know, doing everything by geo, each rep is covering every single industry that you cover. And so you're the master of all and, or sorry, the jack of all trades, master of none.
SPEAKER_31Yeah. I want to keep this moving. So I'm going to push on in a second, but just to have an anecdote,
OTHER GUESTwatch fast food companies as they grow and then crush their menus. This is a classic example of it. Inertia is always going to push you as a broad a net as possible. When I was speaking earlier, it was a little bit, maybe too much with a, the blinders of RevOps on. A lot of people in your organization are going to want to go the opposite direction with it. And it's your responsibility
OTHER GUESTin RevOps to kind of try and keep guard on that. But yeah, watch Starbucks, watch McDonald's. They will focus in on a product set for a particular set of customers. Those customers show up and they just keep adding and they just keep adding, they just keep adding. And then suddenly people start going to other restaurants because they don't know what they're supposed to be getting to McDonald's and McDonald's doesn't mean anything to them. And then they chop their menu in half and people start coming back. Just watch it. Happens all, probably every five years. All right. That's,
OTHER GUESTthat's a weird anecdote, but I'm going to, I'm going to pivot back here. Yeah, let's keep going though. We're going to pivot back here. Interview your, your, your folks get a set of variables that they think matter. Try to go as deep on that as possible and as unique to you and your organization as possible. Then use the data that you've got to check that. So work backwards, look at people that came into the funnel a year ago and how they progressed and like measure them against these variables and see if the ones that have these variables are actually winning deals at a higher
OTHER GUESTrate and at a higher price point. There's a lot of fancy stuff that you can do if you know how to run regressions and, you know, maybe you've got machine learning algorithms or whatever that your team has access to. A lot of people don't. So just like, just do correlation. That's a good, good enough
OTHER GUESTplace to get started. And you'll be able to check without a huge data set, whether or not something is trending in one direction or not. All you needed to do is to trend in the right direction. By what
OTHER GUESTdegree? As long as it's not nothing, then that's a good thing to start tracking. Right? So if you notice that customers in a certain industry are closing at a higher rate than other ones in the industry,
OTHER GUESTthen yes, mark that. Let's go after more customers in that industry. And as we go through time, you're going to continue to test that in sort of a non, maybe slightly scientific way. But as long as you're constantly testing that, you're going to be able to like keep on top of this and make sure
OTHER GUESTthat people are chasing the right, the right customers. Makes a lot of sense. I burned a lot of
SPEAKER_21time on my last commentary. So I'll let you move on to the next point. It's all good. It's all good,
OTHER GUESTman. I just want to make sure that we're being tactical here because I think that that's really where the value is. So you can't do any of this unless you have the data in your CRM. So obviously do whatever you can to enrich that. Make sure that your CRM has as many accounts in it as possible. You may have to employ data sources, tools, technologies, maybe a data enrichment intern for a bit, whatever. But you want to get as many of the accounts that you think are applicable, maybe all of them in a certain industry, all of them in a certain region, just start from. Because the last thing you want to do is to go through this exercise and you find out that actually only 200 accounts matter. My reps can cover 100 accounts each, and I've got five reps to feed. And then what? So overdo this. Overdo this piece. Be as exhaustive as you can with that. I can't stress that enough. And then secondarily, test the data that you're getting. I was in e-commerce space and we were looking at industries and a bunch of them are misclassified. We had Long John Silvers as a heavy manufacturer listed in there. It was garbage. That
OTHER GUESTgot put into someone's territory. The territory danced and sung and they didn't buy into it at all because Long John Silvers was a heavy manufacturer. So you really only have one shot at this. You have to
OTHER GUESTget buy-in from the beginning. So to get ahead of that, do some data quality testing, try to get up
OTHER GUESTas many duplicates out of there as possible and go in as clean as you can when you start building these things out. It's also going to mess up your results if your data is funky. You won't be able to draw the conclusions that you would otherwise be able to draw if you have that. Yeah, so much in there to unpack.
EDDIE REYNOLDSQuestion for you. How do you balance out this desire to have this broad set of data with the cost
EDDIE REYNOLDSto get that data and also just the effort to put it in there? Where do you find the balance? Like, I'd love to have like 8 million accounts in our Salesforce that all have perfect data because we paid for it from ZoomInfo and we also outsourced to the Philippines to have each one of them manually researched. How do we balance these? Well, you do have to do a little bit of that. Like,
OTHER GUESTdata isn't free. You know, people are typically, if your company has been around for a while, you're probably going to have a lot of accounts in there. So it may be a matter of cleaning up. It's easier to get stuff in there clean to begin with than it is to clean up stuff after the fact. So it depends on where you are. It's probably pretty easy in a lot of industries to get a list from some source of all of them. You know, trade publications might have lists. You know,
OTHER GUESTsomething like ZoomInfo is a great start, but you know, just making sure you get that stuff in there
OTHER GUESTto begin with, I think is a better place to be. Cleaning it up after the fact, you kind of just have to spot check. You know, a good thing is that a lot of these tools will refresh their data on a regular. And so you can set up an integration that pushes stuff straight into Salesforce or
OTHER GUESTwhatever systems you're using on a repeat basis. So refresh every week, refresh every month.
OTHER GUESTUnfortunately, I hate to say it, but it kind of depends maybe on your industry a bit.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, I think it does. And I think, I think, although it'd be interesting if you want to debate this with me, that you've got to choose your battles because you have to protect selling time as
EDDIE REYNOLDSwell. I know that like when I worked at Salesforce, for example, and I don't know that they're the end-all be-all in great data management, but they did a really good job of making sure that
EDDIE REYNOLDSno accounts were ever created that were not accurate and put in the right territory. And they did that by not allowing salespeople to even create accounts. And they looked for certain things, but then beyond that, like there were a lot of data issues that they had. And I think that they looked at that and said, this isn't perfect, but we've got to choose our battles. How do you see
EDDIE REYNOLDSbalancing that with like, if I'm one of your A's, Joel, respectfully, I know you want perfect data, but like I got deals to close and I got so much time to spend doing data updates.
OTHER GUESTYeah. What I would say is don't install this new territory process until it's ready. Whatever you're using right now, keep using it, which means don't pull salespeople away to
OTHER GUESTspend a lot of time doing this project. So if you need to start with your BDR team and move your way upwards, the least amount of time and distraction that you're applying to the sales team, the better. So again, that's why I prefer tools. I prefer offshore teams. If you have that kind of thing, maybe interns from the local college, you know, maybe members of your team, there's a lot of things that you can do that, that won't deviate the sales team from their focus. Yeah, I completely agree. And not to plug our own services too much, but we do have an entire data
EDDIE REYNOLDSteam. And one of the things that I've found to be incredibly valuable that they do is using algorithms to identify those duplicates that are either definitely duplicates, and then we can just use a machine to merge them or potentially duplicates. And then we can hand that off to, you know, an EA or a team in the
EDDIE REYNOLDSPhilippines or what have you to manually go through that. And it saves everybody just an incredible amount
SPEAKER_34of time. Also, you can do some of that stuff, but even with the tools, just right inside of Salesforce.
OTHER GUESTYeah. There will be a top transition point at some, at some point in the future where I would highly recommend you do get control on who can create accounts and you would limit that away from your sales team. If you do not do that today, that's probably the source of a lot of duplicates and bad
OTHER GUESTdata, but you'll have to make sure that you get buy-in before you just rip that away. You can't just take that away and upset the apple cart too much or else you might get off on a wrong foot as it pertains to this topic. Because again, this topic is fraught with contention and politics and territorialisms and all the things that go with that. So make sure you tread lightly and have your ducks in a row.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that's fair. I know that if I wanted to create an account at Salesforce, I would ironically have to like email an SDR and ask them to create it for me. And then they had a process they had to follow to make sure like, do we have a duplicate? Is this account in this territory or not? Let's put it in the right territory. And that would only go to me if it was indeed meant to be in my territory.
OTHER GUESTYeah. I think that's a great process to have. If you want to use your development reps for that kind of thing. Ideally, you don't even have to bother them if you set this up right. But we'll get onto the next pieces of this, which are who gets what and who can handle what. And I think that's a little bit of a segue into capacity planning, which you teased earlier, Eddie. What is the right size of a territory is always a really big question. And the answer is your go to market motion will determine that. So if you have a person, if you reset your territories once a year, let's say, and you, a person within that team can only handle, let's say 500 accounts in that year. Well, then a territory should be 500 accounts, maybe a little bit more, you know, if they want to over, overdo it. If you are an enterprise or strategic sales team and you are at Microsoft and Microsoft is your customer and that's it. Well, your territories won. So you need to do a little bit of research.
OTHER GUESTYou need to be able to talk to your sales managers in particular, going to be great to help you understand this. Like, what is the expectation for the rep in that team as far as coverage is concerned? Because another way that you get leakage in this whole process is that accounts are not being touched. Right? So not only does a rep not necessarily go after the right accounts, if you just give them a territory that's way too big, but if you give them a territory that's 500 accounts and they can only cover a hundred of them, you've got 400 top notch accounts that are not getting touched. And that is absolutely not where you want to end up. What about contacts not being touched? What if you're going
SPEAKER_52single thread through every account, but there are three or four other key stakeholders that can
EDDIE REYNOLDSinfluence and generate a pipeline for you that you're not touching?
OTHER GUESTYeah, it's, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. So what's the expectation for each of these account about the number of personas that you would reach out to? Right? You know, if I own Microsoft, there's a ton of people maybe at Microsoft that I want to talk to. However, if I've got 500 accounts, maybe there's only two people at each account, maybe three. And so that's also going to be where we end up is the last stage of this is actually getting the people
OTHER GUESTand their information, the contact points, the phone numbers, the email addresses, the LinkedIn profiles, et cetera, into the CRM so they can optimize this. At the end of the day, we want to provide the salesperson with a list of not only the accounts that you go after, but here's also the updated contact information for all of them. So they don't have to think at all. They just can just burn away at these things and crush it. Tell me if you're in line with this, but the way I think about this is
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat let's say that there are four contacts that we should be going after in each organization on average. And I think about what is our actual outbound process? How long does it take? How many calls can
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe actually do in a day and still have effective messaging? And so then you kind of take that math and compare it to the math of the number of people per account. And you can also take the number of outreaches you want to do if we're talking about cold outbound and you can quickly figure out how many accounts can I cover in a month or two months. And then you put them into a sequence or a cadence if we're talking about just going pure outbound and you can pretty quickly figure out how many accounts need to go into each of those sequences or cadences in a given period of time. That's exactly the conversation you should have with the managers,
OTHER GUESTright? What is the expectation for what someone should be, how many people someone should be hitting? Therefore, how many accounts can they hit? Therefore, over X period of time, while we're, while we sort of have a territory in place before we reset it, you know, like how many accounts should be in there? And again, give yourself a little bit of buffer. What we're going to do later on is we're going to continue to add accounts to the system and we're going to sort of rotate in and out accounts that we know, let's say, you know, an account we've spoken to them. They're not interested. They've signed a five-year agreement with a competitor. Maybe we don't want to have them, you know, pinged every day by our team. Let's circle back on that later. Okay. Swap that account out. Not an ideal prospect at the moment. It's not a bad account, but it's not an ideal prospect at the moment. Let's bring a new one in. Let's replace that. And so you're going to have to have some of this stuff off to the side in addition to this. And so you're constantly should be refreshing the accounts that are in people's books. You're also going to want to have accounts off to the side so that
OTHER GUESTyou have accounts available for when the next person joins. So hopefully your team is growing and you're going to need accounts to feed to them when they join your company and not just the leftovers at the bottom of the pile. Yeah. And I think a key point here is rather than just giving each rep a
EDDIE REYNOLDSthousand accounts that they can't possibly cover, let's say the right number is 200, we're giving the 200 best accounts. And we're making sure that all of the sales resources we have as a company are focused on the highest opportunity list that we can possibly give them. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
OTHER GUESTWhich is another reason why geography, I think, has weakened as a structure. I think it makes a lot of sense when you can only travel in a certain amount of distance. But if you're doing everything virtually, you have an inside sales team. It doesn't make sense to call, you know, have 50 reps in Wisconsin, calling an airplane manufacturers. There's not enough of them up there. So what, when you can just do it
OTHER GUESTbased on a list, as opposed to a region, you're going to set yourself a lot for a lot more efficiency, I think. And your, your region, one region won't be the size of New York City and the other region, the size of the entire state of Montana. You're going to be able to like manage things a little bit more evenly. Yeah. Makes sense. Well, let's be cognizant of time. I'll let you move on to your next major point here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Yeah. So this stuff is going to help out in a lot of different ways. So not only is this going
OTHER GUESTto stitch your product and product market fit to the territory that somebody is going to have, it's actually going to help you understand the strategy or feedback into your strategy and product
OTHER GUESTdevelopment cycle. And what I mean by that is the specific following thing. If you know what your targeted accounts are and you know the likelihood to buy based on certain variables, you can very easily come up with an equation that tells you this is the value of this account before you even prospect into it. So if I've got a 10% likelihood to buy and the average deal size is this, then one times the other equals that. Your territory sizes should also be balanced for this. So you can't give someone a 100, let's say the territory size we determined needs to be a hundred. You can't get somebody a hundred accounts that have a high likelihood to buy, but don't buy the average size deal that buy a lot of small deals. And then another person, a hundred accounts that on average buy a lot of large deals. This is sort of the art to this is like finding the right mix of accounts by size of potential opportunity.
OTHER GUESTSo we know the number of accounts, we're balanced by the size of the opportunity. Then we just have to like figure out the accounts to put in there specifically. So it's really those
OTHER GUESTthree things. And if you have those three things, you've got the right territories.
EDDIE REYNOLDSHere's a great example of this. So again, Salesforce did a lot of really great things, not the end all be all. And what I saw work and not work is they would say, okay, well,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe sell licenses. So the more employees a company has, the more licenses they can buy. Therefore, it's a more valuable account. That makes sense to an extent where things would fall off is they would say, okay, this company has 500 employees and this company has 500 employees. However, the problem is, is maybe the first company is a software company and they might have 50 salespeople. The other is a manufacturing company and they might have two salespeople and 498 people on the floor running machines, not logging into Salesforce. And you could see that in the data as well. Like you could pretty easily figure out that also, in addition to this, that software companies by and large would spend more money on Salesforce than manufacturing companies on average. So you could take the data and run the analysis on that and determine that a 500 person manufacturing company is worth far less than a 500 person software company. That's exactly right. That is exactly
OTHER GUESTright. And tracking the number. If you find that there's that much of a discrepancy, well then maybe size of company, isn't the right variable. Maybe this would be, you've been using before, but maybe it's not the right variable. Maybe number of sales headcount is right. And so sort of getting into the, what's idiosyncratic to you guys that drives, what's an ideal customer is something to maybe add to your formula and kind of circle back and like loop it into your,
OTHER GUESTloop it into your, your research and your enrichment for your data processes. If we know the size,
OTHER GUESTthe size of a territory and what it should be, and we generally know like the opportunity that we're dealing with, how do you kind of connect the two? You really should have a rev ops kind of territory, specific scoring algorithm. And it doesn't have to be some like fancy equation. It's more or less the same stuff that we've been doing up until now. It's just like, we know these five variables matter. Give them a point score, give each one a point. Okay. If they've got five, then that's five points. If you've got four of the five, then that's four points and just get them into a tiering structure. Maybe assign more points. If you know something matters the most, but like just get them into a tiering structure where you're, you've got them sort of priorities or order top, take the top 10% of those accounts and just call those like your A's, your tier ones, your gold stars. Those should definitely be in people's territories. Take the next 20% of those accounts, but give those a B, a number two, you know, a silver star, whatever you want. Those should probably also be in people's territories. The rest of it, I think you can, if you've got a big enough account set, you can probably do away with it or kind of set that off to the side. I like to think of like, if you get the top, I'm doing Pareto principle stuff here, but basically like 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. I think that holds true in most places. I think it's proven to hold true in a lot of places. So really, you know, we're getting the top 20%. So you're going to get your 80% of your sales or close to it. And then you're adding kind of like that next 10%. So to recap, top 10% are A's, next 20% are B's. Those become your territories and you're going to cover the vast majority of your sales out of those accounts. And if you've got enough, hopefully that's enough to build your territories off of, but take the rest of it. And it kind of has two different flavors. One, maybe it's not as great an account. Okay. We're still going to market to them because maybe we might have a data point wrong or maybe, you know, they're growing and next year, they're going to be more important. So we're going to continue to market to like the third group, but there's also a bunch of there that we just probably don't know a whole lot about yet. And so they may be A's or B's, but we need to continue to spend the time to make sure that they're scored properly and have the variables tracked properly. And so you're constantly kind of continuing to like massage and work the ones in
OTHER GUESTthis sort of bottom category as you market to them, et cetera. You're not ignoring them, but having your salespeople focus on the top is really where the leverage comes from the whole organization.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. This is a methodology that I've followed for a long time. This is what Salesforce uses.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I think you also want to think about how this correlates with the actual outbound process. So those tier ones are where you'd have a highly tailored approach. You might go to the website, look through every single executive, maybe read their annual report, their blog posts, et cetera, depending on the size of the company, obviously, and just go really deep. Those tier twos, you might not have as much time to go that deep on. And so where you're saying, hey, we're just going to take 10% and make them the tier one. That makes a lot of sense because you get a very small list that you can go very deep into because you think this is where your big strategic deals are going to come from. That tier two, you got to work a little bit more efficiently. And in tier three, you're working far more efficiently by primarily letting marketing do the work and then seeing what comes of it. And then as you have those conversations, you collect more information that then informs whether or not those tier ones need to become tier threes or tier threes need to become tier ones because you now not have new information. But this brings us to our debate that we knew we were going to get into, Joel. Should that be the sales rep or should that be RevOps determining how those accounts move?
SPEAKER_00I think we might be talking about two different things and let me explain. So there is a, should
OTHER GUESTbe a sales owned process for determining what the top targeted accounts are, where you're going to dive deep and you're going to do the research and you're going to read your quarterly reports and you're going to become an expert in them as your prospect in them. And then there is maybe a tier two or tier three, whatever you have your targeted list. It's constantly rotating. Um, and you're, you're just kind of working your way through it. And it's sort of a work plan or an account planning strategy. If something is a tier one in that sense, great. But what we want to do is make sure that everything in the account is a T is a tier one or two from a RevOps perspective, which is why I use a lettering system usually to start off with like an A and a B because for me, the profile of the account might be great. And that's still an A account or a B account, but the salesperson may not be prioritizing that one because maybe they know, uh, they're not up for contract for another nine months or maybe of the, of the A's, these 10 accounts are who I'm focusing on. So those are tier one A's. And then the next set of accounts are tier two A's. So you have both a sales tactical approach that is a tiering and a prioritization, but your, your profile should be managed by revenue operations. Does that make sense?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. That's really interesting. Cause I think the issue is that as, and you and I like did this planning over, uh, over Google docs. So this is the first time we're actually chatting through this. When I read it, I was thinking, oh, well, where's the field in Salesforce that I need to update after I've like done all this deep research or I talked to somebody and found out new information that they're with our competitor and they're in a four-year contract. So it sounds like you have like one field. So your, your A's and your B's and another field where the sales rep can say, okay, within that, this is our tier one. Yeah. The A's and B's doesn't even have to be visible to your sales team
OTHER GUESTbecause you don't necessarily have to have your sales team adjusting that. It's sort of like if we know, B2B SaaS companies in New York city are ideal profiles for us. That's great. Make a territory out of those accounts. Then the salesperson gets their accounts that are already filtered, which of which we think there's a high propensity to buy from all of them based on their profile. All right. Now let's weed through and figure out which ones are actually the ones I'm going to go after. Because clearly even within this group of good accounts, there are some great accounts and there are some not so great accounts. And then there's some, some dogs, maybe like, I don't want to give the impression that everything that's in those A's and B's is going to be perfect because you might
OTHER GUESThave bad data. That company might be going out of business. It's a bad business climate generally, or there's a shift in market. Like there's all, all kinds of reasons why there'll be some duds there.
OTHER GUESTThis is a directional thing as opposed to a hard and fast, absolutely. Like this is the account that's the most important for you. What I want to say as well as there's a corollary to that in that in the stuff that we cordoned off to the side and kind of had marketing go after, there is going to be awesome accounts in there for the same reasons. Maybe we don't have the data right. Maybe they're growing really fast, et cetera. So both groups are going to have good accounts and bad accounts. It's just that in the territories, we want the optimal amount of top accounts and very, very few duds. And by doing that, what we're expecting is like over the whole portfolio accounts that we give reps, they're going to have a lot higher propensity to buy. They're going to sell bigger deals. They're going to spend all their time focused on the right things. And then it's up to the
OTHER GUESTtactics of the sales rep and like their expertise to like go hone in and figure out who to attack first. Yeah. And I will say like equally, uh, first I'm very aligned with that and there's a lot of value in
EDDIE REYNOLDSrev ops doing all that upfront work for the sales rep. What I've experienced, I've never had rev ops do this for me. And so then I'm sitting there spending all my sales time doing this research. I'm running reports in Salesforce. I'm analyzing data. My colleagues may not be able to do that. Like there's a lot of folks
EDDIE REYNOLDSI worked with at Salesforce, didn't know how to run a report in Salesforce might sound crazy, but this is the truth. And so now they're not able to call the most effective accounts because they don't know how to like build this out and, or they're losing all this time. So if rev ops starts that process by looking at all the data, then you can go deeper and say, oh, like I can see the call note from the last rep that just met with their entire executive team six months ago. And the 15 reasons why this is a terrible customer. Rev ops is not going to catch that, but I think that it shouldn't be on the sales rep to be doing basic data analysis and looking at like industry codes and employee head count and things that can all be run algorithmically to get them a huge head start. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
OTHER GUESTIt's, um, uh, it's one of those, the idea is rising tides, raise all boats. So whether you're, you don't need to like have a, uh, Eddie like yourself, a sales force whiz, you can cut through the data and do the analysis on their own to prioritize their accounts. You don't want to have to rely on that. You want all of your reps, uh, no matter their sophistication and sales force or whatever CRM you're using. Uh, you don't want to ever have to rely on that. You want to have them all fed the right stuff to begin with. And so taking this down to the ground, like actually you've got these balanced accounts or balanced territory, sorry, that are the right sides that have the garbage sort of cut away from them. What's left is like solid, um, the best possible grouping of accounts that you can provide to your sales team. Only then should you go for contact number one, right? A lot of people will go find the personas or the directors or the top fancy titles that work at all these companies, the CEO of every company that is not, that is not a good use of time. So we're talking about the top 30% of your accounts that are in your territories. If you only focus on getting the contact details for them, you should be like saving a lot of time. You're saving 70% of your time. Now, of course we want contact details for all the other ones and marketing will absolutely need the, the contact details for the ones that are left over, but you really should tighten up and research all of the persona driven contacts and titles that matter to those A's and B's that are in your territories. So not only do your reps know who to go after generally, but the contact information is there to begin with. So it's almost like waking up in the morning, going into work and having like a call list prepared for you. That saves so much time for your sales reps and makes them super duper efficient and they're going to love you for it. So can I take this even a step further? Yeah. Yeah. So for me, I'm a really big
EDDIE REYNOLDSadvocate that salespeople should be doing their research before reaching out. And it is so incredibly
EDDIE REYNOLDStime consuming to go find that person on LinkedIn, go find their website, go figure out like where XYZ is. It depends on, you know, the data that you're, that you need in order to sell. If you can have all of that at the click of a button, right in one place, whether it's in Salesforce or outreach or sales loft, wherever they're doing their prospecting, and you can do this in these tools. Now, all of a sudden you just click four links and boom, boom, boom, all your tabs open up. You do the research that can massively accelerate this even further. That's exactly right. Yeah. So on a contact, I would say you want to get a
OTHER GUESTphone number if you can get it. You definitely want to get an email address if you can get it, get their LinkedIn. That's the stuff that a lot of people miss, get their LinkedIn profile. So they can just like sales rep comes in clicks, boom, LinkedIn, there's their job history. There's a link to their company. They'd have to go searching for that stuff. And then, you know, if there's a specific thing that your business needs, you know, in your interviewing process, try to tease out like, what do your reps want to have? What kind of sources of information do they look at? Are there trade specific publications or, you know, just the kind of things that we talked about in the very beginning of this conversation?
OTHER GUESTAre there like specific things that your business would want to research before they dive in? Try to get that captured and linked into that contact. There's no reason not to do it. It's very easy to put a field on there and say, you know, LinkedIn profile link or something. Yep. Social media profiles are really big for certain people in certain industries and very much
EDDIE REYNOLDSnot. Although it feels like everyone's on LinkedIn. Twitter is a good example where that might be really great if you're trying to sell the VCs, but maybe not so much if you're trying to sell the manufacturing companies. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of this is data enrichment.
OTHER GUESTYou know, I mean, I think that's what this is all coming down to. So it really sort of requires that you step up in that direction. And I know a lot of people don't necessarily want to, or have a hard time selling that idea of spending money on enrichment and more tools and things, because they can be pretty expensive sometimes. I think this is the biggest way that you can make a case that that stuff is valuable. And then it just helps out all kinds of areas of your business. So anyway, hopefully that's helpful. I would say at minimum, what you're trying to start out with at least is two contacts on that account that are related to the personas that you have deemed ideal to chase after. Um, so if you've got that, you're golden. And if, if you go out with your, with your stuff, uh, your, your rental rollout territories and maybe you've only got one, well, that's a heck of a lot better than not doing anything. So like all of this stuff, it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect from that standpoint. You can always add this stuff later. You're just going to get a lot more bang for your buck. If you, if you do go as far with this as you can. So yeah, uh, kind of the final stage is sort of rolling this out. So ideally you've got the input from your, your sales reps, your sales managers. Uh, you've got the right size of, territories based on that. You've got the right accounts in the territories, which are your top 30% of accounts, your A's and your B's. And then you're going out and you're researching and adding contact information. So who is the person there? What is their title? And then a couple of different ways to contact or research about them. And you're kind of going out there with that. If you go out there with that, people are going to be pretty darn happy. I had a feeling, uh, and sort of explaining to them, do some enablement sessions about how I'm supposed to use this new territory. Oh my gosh, I used to have a thousand accounts. Now I've only got 200. What's happening. The world is collapsing. Just kind of like walking them through that and explaining them about how they expect to use it. And then having guardrails then put in place to say, Hey, you can't add any more accounts, Mr. Or Mrs. Sales rep. We need to keep these things a little bit more buttoned up. And then having that process for when do you add accounts to the system and who can do it? When do you cycle out an account? Because you know, they're not going to buy. And how do you replace that? What happens if there's a dispute? So accidentally we have Nestle in two different regions. Okay. What do we do with that? Should you, as a, you know, do you have tactics for rules of engagement around, okay, I'm allowed to, that's okay because maybe different locations can be sold by different people. Or is that a really big problem because really our solution works for the corporate level only. And one person needs to own the entire subsidiary chain of all these accounts. There's a lot of things you need, you should have in place around that is just simple rules of engagement. And if you don't at least have a dispute resolution process, that's clear and consistent. And then finally know how long these are going to be in place. So if someone is going to be able to burn through their territory in six months, you need to make sure you're refreshing territories on the regular every six months, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of this may be determined by the size of territory and the refresh rate. But I promise you, if you apply a lot of these suggestions and tactics, you will see a big increase in the conversion rate during the prospecting process. And that's
OTHER GUESTgoing to result in more pipeline, hopefully larger deal sizes and higher win rates overall. Love this. And that takes us basically to time, unless you got anything more you want to add, Joel.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, just let me know how it goes. I've taught this class at a couple of different places and it's
OTHER GUESTusually gotten a pretty good response. So industries change. I think it's been about two years since the last time I did that. So hopefully people find value in this. And then if you find ideas or want to pitch something to make this better, I'm always interested. This is one of my favorite topics. You raise a good point here. Yeah. If anybody's here or listening on the podcast, you guys have
EDDIE REYNOLDSquestions like ping us on LinkedIn. We're both available, happy to help. That's why we do this stuff. So, but anyway, we're at time, Joel, thank you so much for putting this together as always. And thank you all in our audience for coming and joining us for this event. We hope that this was valuable and helpful for you.
