"My biggest struggle right now with AlignStar is that it is too easy to use. I have loaded (our) information to build a document and this took about 5 minutes. Way too short a time, scares me. No really, the product is excellent... OUTSTANDING...!!!" do I need to Optimize my territories?
In over 20 years of business, our experience tells us that:
- Over 50% of all sales territories are poorly designed (too large, too small, have an improper mix of accounts, inefficient travel, fragmented, etc.)
- Most businesses can expect a sales increase of 2% to 7% from a territory optimization with no increase in headcount
Here are some of the indicators of a misaligned sales force that would benefit from optimization. Do any of these apply to your organization?
- Two or more sales forces were folded together hurriedly without the benefit of optimization or proper analysis.
- Your company has changed its strategic direction and did not review the territory alignment to see how it fits the new direction.
- Your territories were designed more than 3 years ago and have not been reviewed since.
- Your territory design was based on sales history rather than workload, market potential or other effort-based data metric.
If so, then you would undoubtedly benefit from a territory evaluation and optimization. Most of our clients are at the cutting-edge of the technology curve with respect to the sales and marketing tools and techniques that they employ in their organizations. It comes as no surprise that they are also leaders in their industry. Take a look at the companies that are already using AlignStar and decide for yourself if you can afford to not optimize your sales territories.
what is an Optimizer and how does it work?
As you already know, developing an efficient sales territory design plan for your organization is a complex, multi-faceted process. It can involve everything from the selection of criteria for designing the territories, finding or developing appropriate data for balancing, incorporating local knowledge, minimization of disruption, and many other factors.
Instead of the tedious process of manually assigning every ZIP code and account to a territory, AlignStar includes a powerful feature based on TTG's proprietary optimization technology that recommends alignment changes. Using your data together with the included drive-time database, AlignStar makes recommendations that increase productive selling time and balance your selected data metric. The territories that it designs for you automatically balance your data and minimize travel time to come up with the best territories possible in a fraction of the time it would take to perform the task manually. For major realignments or new sales or service forces, tell the Optimizer how many territories, districts, and regions you want, and then let AlignStar do the hard work of assigning geography, balancing territories and minimizing travel. When it is complete, you are free to modify the proposed alignment to account for the special knowledge of your managers and the personal preferences of your representatives. You can use the Optimizer on as small or as large an area as you like; it only makes changes where you tell it to make them. After reviewing the optimized results, you can either accept them or go back and try a new scenario using different data metrics, assumptions or even change the numbers of territories, districts or regions.
AlignStar's Optimizer is an automated territory design tool that saves you time and allows you to design territories that are more efficient and easier to serve. It is able to accomplish this by employing its built in digital highway network, drive time database, geographic adjacency tables and TTG's proprietary state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. The Optimizer employs a heuristic model to solve the territory design tasks it is given. Rather than evaluate every possible solution - a process that is, for all practical purposes impossible when you consider that there are over 42,000 ZIP Codes - it uses a self-educating technique to quickly eliminate inefficient solutions allowing it to spend more time on potentially more efficient solutions. The Optimizer can very quickly review many more good solutions than you could possibly complete using a manual process allowing it to find the most efficient solution possible given the constraints and data that you provide. When designing territories, the variables that are important to the Optimizer are:
- Contiguity
- Balance or parity between territories (using the variable or variables that you select)
- Compactness
- Travel efficiency