Beyond the Quota: Why Territory Planning Starts Today
As we race toward the finish of 2025, the leadership teams of well-run companies are already deep into planning for 2026.
Board agendas are incorporating discussion on next year’s growth goals, marketing plans are being drafted, product rollouts are scheduled, and the first pass at quotas is taking shape.
For the front line sales leader, another key question is bubbling to the surface: will we be changing territories?
It’s a fraught topic. When done well, territory realignments can really increase coverate (and revenue attainment)! At the same time, the emotion surrounding changes to territories can really stop progress in its tracks.
That’s why – if you plan to change your sales territories for 2026, the analytical work must begin now.
The Upside of Changing Territories: Higher Attainment and Lower Turnover
Over time, products evolve and external circumastances change that can make different territories have significantly more – or significantly fewer – prospects in them that are great fits for the product. If left unchecked, you can easily get into a situation where a handful of sellers have all of the opportunity – while many sellers have mediocre prospects for success.
When you engineer a system where every seller has an equitable opportunity to succeed in fairly balanced territories, you dramatically increase the odds that more of them will make their number. Instead of relying on a few reps in overloaded territories to carry the team, you create a broader, more reliable base of quota-achieving sellers. Everyone has a fair shot.
This sense of fairness is also a crucial ingredient for a happy and motivated sales force. Great sellers leave when they feel the game is rigged—either because they’re starved for opportunity in a poor territory or they see others succeeding based on luck rather than skill.
By creating a level playing field, you directly address a primary cause of sales attrition. This decreases costly turnover, retains institutional knowledge, and fosters a culture where people believe their effort, not their zip code, determines their success. These two outcomes—more sellers making their numbers and happier sellers who stay longer—mean the entire organization performs better.
The Illusion of the Superstar: My Real Life Experience
Another benefit rebalancing territories is that it strips away luck and reveals true skill. A fair territory plan is the only way to build a genuine meritocracy and make accurate decisions about talent. In The CRO’s Guide to Winning in Private Equity, I share an anecdote about a seller I’ll call Ken. When I was interviewing to lead a team, Ken’s manager couldn’t stop talking about what a great seller Ken was – regularly retiring over 200% of his quota. He was – according to the numbers, and his manager – a superstar.
After taking the job, I met with Ken and was thoroughly unimpressed. He couldn’t clearly articulate our products’ value or his sales process. His explanation was that “the product almost sells itself.” A conversation with one of his peers revealed the truth: our territories were profoundly imbalanced. Due to a geographic idiosyncrasy, 90% of the best prospects in our most lucrative industry were concentrated in Ken’s patch. Every other seller was struggling to make their number with smaller accounts in less promising industries.
When we re-balanced the territories, the team’s performance transformed. Suddenly, many sellers were achieving their quota. Ken continued to win deals, but it became clear he was consuming far more support resources—from solutions engineering to executive sponsorship—than anyone else on the team.
The change revealed he wasn’t a superstar; he was just in a superstar territory. This is why creating demonstrably fair territories is the most effective defense against the turmoil that often accompanies change. By framing the realignment as a strategic move to ensure fairness, leadership can preemptively counter the main source of resistance.
Managing Seller Emotion
Sellers crave stability, and “changing territories” is one of the topics that can create the drama for a team’s morale. This is why I advise leaders to change territories rarely—ideally, just once every 3 or 4 years — to minimize disruption. When you do make a change, the execution must be flawless, which requires a long planning cycle.
The heavy analytical work of remapping territories must happen quietly. My best experiences with territory change have been when sellers get their new territory and comp plan delivered to them as fully-complete documents on the first day of the year – and had no idea change was coming the day before. Rollout communications should also include detail that indicates all of the thought and care that was put into the changes – considerations of account size, revenue potential and geographic balance that ideally are giving every seller an equal chance to succeed.
By keeping news of territory change a secret until the start of the new year, we protect the team’s focus during the critical year-end signing period – nobody wants sellers distracted and grumbling about new territories when they should be closing the deals that make or break the year.
Treating Sellers Fairly for for Deals in Flight
The final piece of a successful realignment is a clear, fair process for handling in-flightdeals that are in changing territories. Whenever I change territories, I use a documented “hold policy” that this demonstrates respect for a seller’s past efforts while creating urgency to close out old business.
The policy has a few simple rules. First, the seller must register a very short list of deals from their old territory that they wish to “hold.” Second, they have a 90-day window to close those deals before they are reassigned to the new territory owner. At the end of the 90 days, if there are deals that we still beleive are vaible, we may create a step-down revenue split with the new territory owner where the original seller’s credit diminishes over time, incentivizing a faster close, while introducing the long-term territory leader in case it doesn’t.
This policy is a critical culture tool. It mitigates the seller’s feeling of loss by providing a clear path to compensation for their prior work, building trust and reducing resentment. At the same time, the 90-day time limit creates a clean break, forcing the seller to prioritize their best legacy deals and then pivot fully to the future of their new territory.
In Sum
Ultimately, redesigning sales territories is among the most difficult tasks a leader will face, blending deep analytics with profound human impact. However, the rewards for getting it right are immense: a culture of fairness, a clearer view of true performance, and a sales engine built for sustained success. The strategic foresight to begin this deliberate design process today is the ultimate differentiator. It’s the difference between reacting to the market in 2026 and actively shaping your destiny within it.
