At the territory carve
Selling starts early this year.
Designed so the handovers finish before cutover: little to organise by hand, and control, because every account is in view.
What happens at a territory carve
Dozens of accounts change owner on one date, and the people handing them over are supposed to be selling.
In a growing sales organisation, the territory is re-carved at the start of every fiscal year: new countries and new local country organisations are added, and accounts move between key accounts and strategic accounts. That is what growth looks like, not a sign that anything is broken.
How it usually goes
Every fiscal year start in GTM: zero sleep, more grey hair, and your customer does the handover for you.
As the manager, you are sitting in your twelfth handover call. Five more to go, and these are only the ones you chose to attend. On all the others, you have no idea what is falling through the cracks.
After cutover, the customer explains to the new owner who signs and what was agreed. That is the handover, a few weeks late.
The carve costs selling time even where handovers work: the rep handing over, the rep taking over and the manager sit in handover meetings instead of with customers. Those weeks fall at the start of the quota year, when first-half pipeline has to be built.
At the far end of the scale is hibernation, where the first part of a twelve-month quota goes to handing over, with no active selling. How many weeks of your quota does the carve cost?
What good looks like
Before cutover, RevOps knows per account who is ready, and every receiver walks into the first call already knowing.
The handovers fit in the weeks before, while whoever held each account can still answer.
The plan you have already made becomes the fewest sessions it allows, all of them finished before cutover.
As designed, accounts that move between the same people are handed over in one sitting. Where one rep passes two accounts to a colleague and another passes one to the same colleague, that is one session with the receiver, each rep in turn, not three meetings.
Each account gets the depth it needs, and a fit check per rep shows whether it all fits.
Each receiver gets one brief covering every account they inherit and reads it back account by account.
Indicative cadence. The module is in development, and this page gives it no date.
What the carve costs
A territory carve is planned as coverage and quota, and its cost is booked under other names.
It lands on plan risk, gross retention, gross margin and cost of sales.
Poorly executed territory alignment costs 2 to 7 per cent of revenue.1 Where an account changes owner, the nearest published study puts the loss at 13 to 17 per cent of its annual sales.2 Neither figure is yours, and yours sits in your own CRM.
Not for you if
Where nothing crosses when the map is redrawn, there is no case.
Nothing crosses if the re-carve moves quota and leaves the named accounts where they are.
Sources
- Zoltners, A. A., Lorimer, S. E. (2000). Sales Territory Alignment: An Overlooked Productivity Tool. Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management 20(3).
- Shi, H., Sridhar, S., Grewal, R., Lilien, G. (2017). Sales Representative Departures and Customer Reassignment Strategies in Business-to-Business Markets. Journal of Marketing 81(2). Cited as the nearest published event, not as a figure for any reader’s own accounts.