Sales territory design: 30 years of modeling and implementation
Answers
It defines whom a salesperson will call on and who his or her immediate manager will be. It impacts com- pensation and motivation. This paper describes thirty years of model, pro- cess, system, and wisdom development for establish- ing good sales territory alignments.
Answer:
Sales territory alignment is the assignment of accounts and their associated selling activities to salespeople and teams. Models, systems, processes, and wisdom have evolved over 1,500 project implementations for 500 companies with 500,000 sales territories. Optimization models have evolved over time to explicitly consider travel time along road networks and customer disruption. Personal computers with continually increasing speeds and storage capabilities, the Internet, and mapping databases have enabled the development of systems that communicate alignments visually to sales managers. Because of their combinatorial complexity, multiple conflicting objectives, and personnel aspects that touch everyone in the salesforce, the alignment models were unable to completely solve the sales territory alignment issues faced by companies