Territory Planning

Territory planning is how RevOps translates market opportunity into sales coverage. Good territory design gives every rep a fair shot at quota while ensuring the company's total addressable market is adequately covered. Bad territory design creates permanent winners and losers before a single call is made.

Territory Models

• Geographic: Divide by region, state, or zip code. Simple but ignores account density and market potential variation.
• Named account: Assign specific accounts to reps. Common in enterprise sales. Requires careful matching of rep skills to account needs.
• Industry/vertical: Reps specialize in verticals (healthcare, finance, tech). Builds deeper expertise but limits territory size.
• Hybrid: Combine geography + size + industry. Most enterprise RevOps teams use some hybrid model.

RevOps Best Practices

The cardinal rule: territories should have roughly equal revenue potential, not equal account counts. 100 SMB accounts and 10 enterprise accounts might have the same revenue potential. RevOps uses historical data, market sizing, and pipeline velocity by segment to model territory balance.

Rebalancing happens annually (or when the sales team grows significantly). Frequent changes disrupt relationships and pipeline. Track quota attainment variance across territories — high variance means the territories are unbalanced.