World Map
Creative Commons License photo credit: Steph & Adam

Two forces can either help you in your sales career (if you are lucky) or hurt you:

territory and timing

If you have a great territory with prospects needing your prospect and timing that they are able to buy, you’re golden.  Life is good.

But in general, time and territory conspire against your success.  And they go hand in hand.

Territory

The notion of not having enough “good accounts” can be tuned to “the well-known companies in the territory are a bad fit.”  Now, there are some territories which are better than others.  Selling something related to financial services in New York is a better fit than in, say, New Orleans.  And selling software-related services better in Silicon Valley than just about anywhere else.

So let’s say you can’t control that.  The challenge is to dig deeper, faster, and cover more of those unknown accounts.  The reality is, bad territories mean you have to uncover many more stones to find the gold.

That really wouldn’t be a problem if you had infinite time.

But you don’t, which leads us to…

Timing

If you don’t get to a customer before your competitor does, you’re in tough shape.  I’ve been in deals when working for a smaller vendor where, because I got there sooner, I had a much higher chance of winning.  I could shape vision, build relationships, sometimes just outright close it before the competition got there.

If you can’t cover as broad a territory as possible in as little time, you are letting territory and timing work against you.

Answer: Wisdom of Crowds

There’s a notion that if you can get a group of people to help, say, guess the number of marbles in a jar, they’ll come pretty close.  What if you could leverage all the information, contacts, and feet on the street of non-competing sales reps in your territory?

Would you know more about accounts, such as who to call and maybe what their needs are, faster?

Sure, it happens informally all the time.  But most people don’t really leverage these other sales reps because of a number of reasons which I’ll blog about later.

But if you want to master the forces of territory and timing to beat your quota, you need to leverage more feet on the street, now, by exchanging contacts and information with as many sales reps in your territory as possible.

Get going!