Sales Territory Alignment:
- "The assignment of accounts and associated selling activities to salespeople and teams"
- Also known as sales territory design, assignment, deployment, realignment and districting
Salesforce Structures
- Generalist structure: salesperson assigned to specific geographic area
- Market-based structure: sales territory is defined by specific account type in addition to geography
- Product-based or activity-based structure: more than one salesperson assigned to an account, each performing different activity or selling a different product
When do we need sales territory alignment?
- Small adjustments are frequent: new accounts, account relocation and demographic shifts
- Major adjustments less frequent: merger and acquisitions, major change in salesforce or structure, new product launch, market condition change
What is "Good Alignment"?
- Good for salespeople, customers, and the company
- Salespeople: equitable opportunities and workload, maintain favored accounts, minimize travel, good manager assignment
- Customers: minimize disruption, receive appropriate salesperson attention
- Company: motivated salesforce, salesforce retention, high sales, low expenses, high profits
Optimization Algorithm:
General formulation:
- Solve alignment problem with 30,000 zip codes and 500 sales territories
- Solution: specialized integer programming model that designs territories to minimize a Euclidean measure of compactness using zip code adjacency to model contiguity
http://www.proalignsoftware.com/index.html
ProAlign’s territory optimizer features:
- Recommend how many territories are needed, or can optimize across a specific number of territories you want
- Specify territories or accounts to remain "untouched", or optimize individual territories
- Show optimal territory center —“home base” — locations, and allow static or floating territory centers to minimize travel and assess efficiency and placement
- Choose to balance on "shape" (i.e. compact) or balance criteria (such as sales, customers or workload), or somewhere in between
Screenshot examples:
ProAlign Web
ProAlign Desktop (built on ESRI ArcGIS)
http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/extensions/business-analyst/what-is-territory-design.htm
No optimization yet, neat tools and charts for summary of sales territories. Only on Windows computers.
http://www.opendoorlogistics.com/index.html https://github.com/PGWelch/com.opendoorlogistics
ODL Studio: Open Source desktop-based application for non-realtime vehicle routing and territory mapping/management ODL Live: Cloud-based engine for real-time vehicle route optimisation and intelligent appointment booking
Optimization of territories using "capacitated p-median clusterer"
