When a territory is recut
For the January recut, so whoever takes the account walks in knowing.
For the CRO and the head of sales operations who cut the plan for the new fiscal year. Ten questions in two minutes show what travels today when an account changes owner.
What the recut costs
It is never booked with the word handover next to it.
A recut is planned as coverage and quota, and the cost lands under other names on lines you already report. Plan risk, where pipeline in flight stalls because the reason a deal was parked was never written down. Gross retention, where a renewal that looked safe becomes a fight. Gross margin, where the new owner discounts to win back ground that was never lost. Cost of sales, where peers and the manager absorb the questions afterwards.
Poorly executed territory alignment costs 2 to 7 per cent of revenue, and about 55 per cent of territories are the wrong size to begin with.1 Where the counterpart on an account changes, the nearest published study puts the loss at 13 to 17 per cent of that account’s annual sales.2 Neither figure is yours, and yours sits in your own CRM.
Why January is different
Nobody leaves, so no process fires, and dozens of accounts change owner on one date.
A resignation at least triggers something: a notice period, a checklist, a manager who knows the date. A recut triggers none of that. Nobody leaves, so nobody is asked to hand anything over, and yet dozens of accounts change owner in one planning cycle, across several colleagues, all of them due on the day the new plan goes live.
So the question that decides the plan is about time before it is about knowledge: does this fit in the weeks before cutover, or does it not.
One session per receiving colleague, all of them finished before cutover.
It starts from the assignment list you have already made, works out who receives what, and batches the capture into one session per receiving colleague, with each contributor invited only to their own accounts.
Indicative cadence, for the module described below, which is in development.
What you can use today, and what is coming
The first handover today. The batch module for the fiscal year turn.
Today there is die erste Uebergabe, the first handover, run with Matthias on one or two accounts that change owner now: three sessions across ten working days, two documents, and coverage per account that your own people verify. Nothing is installed, so there is no login and no rollout. The transition check is ten questions answered from memory in about two minutes. The baseline sets your fastest handovers against your slowest out of an export of last year’s won deals, which says something about the habit and nothing about the plan.
In development, for the fiscal year turn: the batch module described above, which runs the sessions and the verification against the cutover date. It is not part of what you can use today, and this page gives it no date.
Not for you if
Where nothing crosses when the map is redrawn, there is no case.
There is no case here if the person who wins an account is the person who keeps it, because then nothing crosses when the map is redrawn. There is none if your territory stays as it is at the year turn, none if the recut moves quota rather than named accounts, and none if the team that won the accounts keeps them afterwards.
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.