When your sales team is spread across multiple cities, states, or even countries, things can get chaotic fast. Who’s covering which accounts? Are territories balanced? Are reps spending more time driving than selling?

That’s where territory management comes in. It’s the process of organizing, assigning, and optimizing sales territories to improve productivity and performance. Whether you’re a sales rep trying to stay focused or a manager allocating resources, understanding territory management is essential to staying competitive in today’s market.

What is Territory Management?

Territory management is the strategic process of defining and organizing geographic or account-based areas of responsibility for sales reps. It ensures that every rep knows which accounts or regions they own, and gives managers visibility into the field, allowing them to extract insights from rep activity and make data-driven decisions across the team.

Territory management happens at two levels:

• Reps manage their own territories day-to-day.
• Managers oversee and optimize territories across the team.

Further, sales territories can be based on:

• Geography (e.g. zip codes, states, regions)
• Account size or revenue potential
• Industry verticals
• Existing relationships or account history

The goal is to create a sales territory map with clear structure so that sales reps can focus their time and energy on the right prospects without internal conflict or wasted effort. You might also hear the term sales region map to describe high-level layouts of these territories.

A sales territory map or even several sales territory maps are often used to visually represent which accounts or regions each rep is responsible for. These visual tools are essential when you need to map sales territories efficiently and ensure balanced distribution.

Why Territory Management? (Benefits)

Effective territory management leads to significant performance gains across your team. Here’s why it matters:

• Improved coverage - No region or account falls through the cracks
• .Increased sales productivity - Boost sales productivity by 10 - 20%! Reps spend more time selling and less time planning or driving.
• Balanced workload - Territories are evenly distributed, preventing burnout.
• Better customer relationships - Consistent rep-account assignments foster trust and familiarity.
• Smarter resource allocation - Sales leadership can better align rep skills with market opportunities.

Ultimately, territory management is about doing more with the same (or fewer) resources.

When To Do Territory Management

Sales territory management isn’t a one-and-done activity - it’s an ongoing process that should be revisited at key moments to keep performance and coverage optimized. What are some of those key moments when you should evaluate and adjust your sales territories?

• At the start of a new sales year or quarter
• After major market or economic changes
• When expanding into new regions or industries
• When adding or reassigning reps
• After reviewing performance data

Regularly reviewing and refining your sales territory mapping process ensures that your team’s coverage stays efficient, competitive, and aligned with business goals - no matter the business cycle, the shifting market, or any internal changes.

How to Do Territory Management

Managing territories well is a combination of data, strategy, and iteration. Here’s a basic step-by-step process:

1. Define your goals - What are you optimizing for? Revenue? Coverage? Growth?

2. Analyze your market - Use account data, demographics, travel time, and past sales to understand territory potential.

3. Segment your customers and prospects - Group accounts by size, location, vertical, or value.

4. Create initial territories - Assign reps to clear, non-overlapping areas based on your segmentation. The best modern tools will facilitate this automatically.

5. Review and test - Monitor performance, get rep feedback, and track KPIs like sales volume, close rate, or customer churn.

6. Adjust as needed - Territory management isn’t one-and-done. Update alignments when markets shift or team members change.

Once you’ve analyzed your market and segmented your customers, the next step is to create a sales territory map. This gives you a visual overview of coverage and helps ensure a logical, data-driven strategy and assignment of resources.

Common Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Territory management comes with pitfalls. Here’s how to anticipate and prevent them:

• Unbalanced territories - Use data to compare rep workloads and potential revenue. Avoid giving one rep too many high-value accounts while another struggles with low potential.
• Territory overlap - Clearly define boundaries and ownership. Even a little overlap can cause friction.
• Not revisiting - Markets change. Reps quit. Territories must evolve accordingly.
• Ignoring rep feedback - Reps often have insights into what’s working (or not) in the field. Include them in the planning loop.
• Over-engineering - Don’t make it so complex that no one can understand or manage the plan.

To prevent issues, it's important to regularly review your sales territory boundaries and adjust them based on performance and market shifts.

Features to Look for in Territory Management Tools

As you can imagine, there are tools that can assist with territory management. While this guide isn’t focused on specific software, it’s important to understand the types of features that make territory management tools effective for both reps and managers.

• Mapping and visualization: The user interface is important! Can you easily view territories on a map? A tool should let you instantly see your territories laid out on a map, giving you at-a-glance clarity.
• Route planning and sales mapping: It’s all about optimization! Reps need tools that help them plan their day efficiently, prioritize high-value targets, and reduce drive time.
• Performance tracking: Managers and reps alike need to see what’s working (and what’s not), so having access to metrics like meetings held, deals closed, or meeting length time can highlight all sorts of opportunities.
• Territory analytics: Look for heat maps, bubble charts, and/or thematic overlays. These types of visual tools reveal where your team is thriving or missing opportunities.
• Territory and route assignment: Flexibility matters when teams change or markets shift. You should be able to assign or reassign to territories or routes with ease.
• Territory creation: This one is big - whether you draw boundaries manually or import shapefiles, creating clean, logical territories is a core function. And though it sounds technical, a good tool will make it feel intuitive.
• Territory alignment and balancing: Are you part of the two-thirds of organizations that are still using spreadsheets for territory design? You don’t have to be! A modern tool will let you auto-generate balanced territories using the metrics that matter most to your business (revenue, account count, travel time, etc.).
• Lead routing: The faster your leads get handed to the right person, the better the conversion rate. Look for software that automatically assigns new leads to the right rep based on geography, industry, potential value, or more.
• CRM integration: Shouldn’t have to say it, but here it is - your territory tool should talk to your CRM software. Real-time syncing ensures reps and managers always work with accurate pipeline, contact, and activity data.
• Mobile app interface: If you’ve got reps in the field, a mobile interface allows them to manage clients and stay organized on-the-go, while also capturing valuable real-time data from the field to improve territory insights and decision-making.
• Scenario testing - It’s nice to see into the future as much as possible, so before making changes, scenario planning features let you preview how territory shifts will impact workload balance or revenue coverage.

Many sales teams also benefit from looking at territory map examples - whether created manually or digitally - to better understand what an effective structure might look like.

Conclusion

Territory management is more than just drawing lines on a map - it’s a strategic approach to maximizing sales potential, improving rep performance, and delivering a better customer experience. When done right, it creates clarity, reduces waste, and unlocks new growth opportunities.

Whether you’re just starting to organize your team’s territories or looking to refine an existing system, investing in good territory management practices is a smart move for any sales leader.

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