As a senior sales leader, you know that territory management is crucial to driving revenue and ensuring long-term customer success. It’s a balancing act of maintaining existing relationships, finding new opportunities and maximizing available time. However, many account managers fall into routines that can limit growth and stall potential. To unlock higher performance and faster territory growth, they need to take a more strategic and purposeful approach.
In this article, I’ll discuss three key steps you can implement with your account managers to accelerate territory growth and improve overall effectiveness. By guiding them to make intentional decisions about where they focus their efforts, setting clear objectives for key and growth accounts and leveraging AI to uncover hidden opportunities, you’ll empower your team to achieve faster and more sustainable results.
1. Stop Making “Milk Runs” and Start Being Purposeful
Many account managers rely on a familiar cycle of visiting their top accounts, whether or not there’s a pressing need for a meeting. These so-called “milk runs” are comfortable because they give the illusion of productivity, but in reality, they limit growth by ignoring higher-value opportunities and leaving little room for proactive, strategic actions.
Take Tom, an account manager who has been working his territory for several years. He has built solid relationships with a handful of key customers, but over time, his visits have turned into routine social calls. He drops by once a month for a brief check-in and leaves without any clear outcome. While these customers continue to place orders, there’s no growth in the business, and Tom misses out on expanding relationships or addressing unmet needs in his territory.
Now, imagine Tom adopts a more purposeful approach. Before each visit, he reviews his account data, identifies new opportunities and sets a specific objective for the meeting, such as introducing a new product line that aligns with the customer’s industry trends. Instead of just checking in, Tom asks targeted questions to uncover pain points and unmet needs. By providing valuable insights and recommendations, he turns a routine visit into a strategic meeting that drives new business.
Takeaways:
- Be strategic: Replace routine visits with strategic, value-driven interactions. Prioritize accounts based on growth potential or current challenges, and tailor your approach accordingly.
- Set clear objectives: Know exactly what you want to achieve during each visit, whether it’s closing a deal, introducing a new product, or gathering information that will lead to future business.
- Maximize every visit: Come prepared with data and insights that add value to the customer, ensuring that each meeting is productive and moves the relationship forward.
2. Set Logical Account Objectives and Create Actionable Plans
A common mistake account managers make is failing to set clear objectives for their key and growth accounts. Without a defined plan, it’s easy to become reactive — addressing only immediate customer concerns — rather than proactive in driving account growth.
Consider Sarah, an account manager with a portfolio of key and growth accounts, along with a mix of B, C and D accounts. While she has strong relationships with her customers, she lacks a formal plan for growing each account. Instead, she waits for customers to reach out when they have an issue or need to reorder, or she drops in haphazardly. As a result, her business remains flat, and she misses opportunities to expand her footprint within her accounts.
So, Sarah decides to take a more proactive approach. She starts by analyzing her key and growth accounts, assessing each customer’s potential for growth based on purchase history, current engagement and market trends. For her largest account, she sets an objective to increase wallet share by 15% over the next year. She creates a plan to introduce complementary products and services that align with the customer’s business goals. By regularly tracking her progress and adjusting her strategy based on account feedback, Sarah is able to grow her largest account by 20% within six months.
Takeaways:
- Analyze account potential: Not all accounts have the same growth potential. Identify which of your current accounts have room to expand and which might need more attention to prevent churn.
- Create actionable plans: For each key and growth account, set clear, measurable objectives and a plan to achieve them. This could be increasing product adoption, growing wallet share, or improving customer satisfaction.
- Execute and track progress: Consistently execute your plan, tracking results along the way and adjusting as needed based on account feedback, market changes and performance.
(For more detail and a step-by-step process for analyzing account potential, setting objectives and creating logical plans to achieve those objectives, read this article.)
3. Use AI-Guided Selling to Uncover Hidden Opportunities
Territory management can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to analyzing large volumes of transactional data. AI-guided selling tools can help make sense of this data and uncover trends or opportunities that would otherwise be difficult to spot. With AI, account managers can focus their efforts on the accounts and opportunities that offer the highest likelihood of success.
Imagine Paul, an account manager asked with managing a large territory. His accounts generate a huge amount of transactional data, but Paul struggles to sift through it all and get value out of it. As a result, he misses key buying signals and overlooks upsell opportunities. Without the ability to analyze the data efficiently, he’s reactive rather than proactive, and his territory remains stagnant.
This motivates Paul to adopt AI-guided selling tools to assist him in managing his territory. The AI system analyzes transactional data and reveals that one of his mid-tier accounts has been steadily increasing their purchases of a specific product. It also flags a potential opportunity to upsell a related product that could improve the customer’s operations. Armed with this insight, Paul reaches out to the customer, recommends the upsell and secures a new order. The AI system continues to track patterns, enabling Paul to focus on the most promising accounts and opportunities, leading to a 30% increase in territory revenue over the next year.
Takeaways:
- Leverage data insights: AI-guided selling tools can process vast amounts of data quickly, uncovering trends and opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
- Spot trends faster: With AI’s ability to detect changes in buying behavior or emerging needs, you can take proactive steps to address these shifts before your competition does.
- Enhance decision-making: AI helps you prioritize your efforts, ensuring you invest time in the most promising accounts and opportunities.
(For more detail on combining the power of AI-guided analysis with buyer-centric consultative selling, read this article.)
Closing Thoughts
As a senior sales leader, you can likely see the synergy in these recommendations—they all reinforce one another. Accelerating territory growth across your team requires a shift from reactive habits to proactive, strategic planning and sound tactical execution.
By guiding your account managers to abandon routine “milk runs,” set clear account objectives and leverage AI to uncover hidden opportunities, you’ll position your team for greater success. Following these steps will not only drive faster territory growth but also foster stronger, more productive customer relationships. Territory management is no longer just about covering ground — it’s about ensuring your team focuses on the right actions, in the right places, with the right tools, to deliver sustainable growth.
Additional Reading
In addition to the two articles mentioned above, these articles support territory management and account management through improved sales effectiveness and sales coaching:
- Sales Coaching Excellence is a Competitive Differentiator
- Grow Faster with These 10 Advanced Skills for Your Sales Force
- The Timeless Tenets of B2B Sales Effectiveness
- Modern Sales Foundations (includes account management methodology)
Mike Kunkle is a recognized expert on sales enablement, sales effectiveness, and sales transformation. He’s spent over 30 years helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class enablement strategies and proven-effective sales transformation systems. In doing that, he’s delivered impressive results for both employers and clients. Mike is the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC and works as the Vice President of Sales Effectiveness Services for SPARXiQ, where he designs sales training, delivers workshops and helps clients improve sales results through a variety of sales effectiveness services. Mike collaborated to develop SPARXiQ’s Modern Sales Foundations™ curriculum and has authored SPARXiQ’s Sales Coaching Excellence™ course, a book on The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, and collaborated with Felix Krueger to develop The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience.