How vMAP Can Help Your Sales Territory Management Sales Territory Identification

Sales Territory

Just like a war, business also requires strategies and tactics to prepare it. If in war we cannot recognize the area of our war, then what will happen (as you know) is, defeat. Likewise with business, if we can recognize the sales territory, then we can find out the potential, analyze, and evaluate our business in the territory.

In business, Sales Territory is a certain geographical area in which there are consumers who have sales potential or business potential that is managed by the sales team, and Sales Territory Management is a method of managing a sales territory,  starting from an understanding of the sales territory, preparing management plans, implementing, and evaluating the management methods & results of managing the sales territory. So, sales territory management is an activity that is carried out periodically and dynamic.

As mentioned above, the first step to starting sales territory management is to understand or identify your sales territory.

How to identify your sales territory?

The easiest step to identify sales territory is to determine or clarify the boundaries of your business territory. The determination of the most common territory used in a business is the administrative boundary. If you ask, why are administrative boundaries often used to determine business territory boundaries? Then the answer is to simplify management and grouping data. Within an area bounded by administrative boundaries, there is demographic data that is the target of your business sales or in other words referred to as consumers. Usually the data has been well managed by the Government Statistics Agency in the area, and usually also easily obtained by only accessing it through official government websites.

The division of administrative units and their mention varies by country, for the division of business areas usually starts from the smallest unit, namely the Sub-District, followed by the City or District / Regency, and the biggest is Province / State. Just like demographic data, to get administrative boundary data we can access the local government website, the data is usually available in the GIS format which is shapefile (shp.).

In vMAP we can display administrative boundaries of a territory by importing it using the Import Data feature. The following figure is a display of shapefile data that has been imported in vMAP, regarding the division of the sales territory sector by sub-district unit in Klaten District, Central Java Province, Indonesia. To determine the color using the Layer Settings feature and labeling using the Label Settings feature.

Figure 1. Sales Territory using Administrative Boundaries

Why is Demographic Data needed?

Demographic data is data that includes human population information in an area, can be in the form of the total population, population categories based on age & sex, population growth rate, and etc. In the business scope, the data is useful for estimating the number of target consumers based on their categories. Consumer categorization aims to determine the priority sales territory, the more people who fall into that category, the higher the priority of sales in that territory.

If you have a sales territory that isn’t too broad, maybe you aren’t too dizzy to manage demographic data to be analyzed and evaluated, but conversely, if you have a very large sales territory it would be complicated if the data you hold numbered in the hundreds to thousands. As one of the solutions for your data management, vMAP is able to display data to help you manage your data visually.

For example, the following figure is a display of demographic information in one of the sales territories in using the Object Inspector feature.

Figure 2. Demographic Info using Object Inspector feature

How to Determine Sales Territories Priority with Demographic Data?

Determining the sales territories priority depends on the target customer for your business, for example, if your business is engaged in selling beauty products then your target consumers are female who has an age range of ≥15 years, assuming women's interest in beauty products starts at the age of 15 years.

By adjusting the color display on the Layer Setting and it's distribution divided into 3 classes using the Equal distribution method, so as to produce a division of sales territories priority into High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority. The following is an example in the vMAP mapview regarding the division of sales territories priority in the Klaten District, with the consumer's target are female consumers aged ≥15 years.

Figure 3. Equal Distribution to Divide Priority Classes into 3 Equal Parts

Figure 4. Division Map of Sales Territories Priority

Adding categories to target consumers will make sales priority territories more specific and vMAP is able to display demographic information on your sales territory, which is expected to help you manage your sales territory.