Overview of the Problem

Maintaining an optimum assignment of accounts to sales reps will help maximize the revenue potential of your sales organization. Due to many factors - including rep turnover, influx of new leads, changes in marketing focus, etc. - account assignments become less efficient over time.

In this context, “efficient” or “optimized” account assignment means:

• The highest potential and most likely-to-purchase accounts in your database are assigned to reps
• Reps have the right number of accounts
• Each rep’s book of accounts is comparable in revenue potential - no reps are favored over others

To address the degradation of assignment efficiency over time, many sales organizations regularly “reshuffle” or redistribute accounts across their sales team.

This redistribution operation is always painful, and sometimes excruciating, for the operations team. They fashion new account books for each rep, via time-consuming, error-prone spreadsheet gymnastics and rounds of review with sales management. These new books must that meet several goals simultaneously:

• include the “right” accounts, representing the best revenue opportunities
• make sure no account that is currently engaged by the sales team is re-assigned
• provide equitable distribution of accounts
• be approved by sales management

This post describes a step-by-step approach to this problem that will allow you to automate account redistribution. Automating redistribution removes pain from sales operations, and allows for more frequent redistribution. Automation can also address related challenges in sales operations, such as building account books for new reps, and dismantling book for departing reps.

Groundwork for Automation

There are five parameters that define how automated account redistribution works. Together, they represent the “spec” that you can use to develop your automated distribution application.

Parameter #1: Defining the Account Universe

You need to define the set of accounts that define the “universe” for this redistribution. This might be by market segment, by region, by customer status, etc. Don’t worry for now about accounts in the universe that shouldn’t be reassigned- that will be addressed in another parameter (“exclusion logic”).

You should be able to define this pool as a query against your CRM application. So as an example, if you are redistributing for the Mid-Market Sales Team for Latin America, your universe would be all the accounts in your CRM database whose region = “Latin America, market segment = “Mid-Market”, and customer status = “Prospect”.

Parameter #2: Define the Pool of Reps and the Account Book Size

This should be the easiest parameter to define. Who are the reps to whom you are distributing accounts? Again, define this in terms of a query you could run against your CRM database. It can be as simple as all sales reps where region = “Latin America, market segment = “Mid-Market”, as an example.

You also need to define how large of an account book each rep should have.

Parameter #3: Define Exclusion Logic

Within the account universe you defined in parameter #1, there will be accounts that cannot be reassigned, perhaps because the current sales rep is actively working the account. For this parameter, you need to define the criteria for when an account is eligible to be reassigned. For example, your logic might say:

An account in the universe can be reassigned only if:

1. There are no open sales opportunity records
2. There are no closed sales opportunity records that closed within the past 120 days
3. There is no activity (meetings, calls, emails) between the sales rep and the account within the past 90 days
4. If the account is a current customer, they cannot be moved in the first year after becoming a customer

The key is to define this logic such that data from the CRM application can provide an unambiguous result - either a “yes, reassignment OK” or “no, reassignment not permitted.”

This step may require consultation with sales management to develop and approve the exclusion logic. You may find that you even have to add a checkbox field to the account object in your CRM, and base an exclusion rule around it to give sales managers a way to arbitrarily block reassignment of certain accounts.

Parameter #4: Scoring Logic

This factor may be the most challenging, but it is key to keeping the sales team focused on the highest-potential accounts, and making sure accounts books are equitable. What you need to define for this parameter is a formula that boils an account’s “quality” down to a single numeric score.

With this formula, you can calculate a score for each account. This score lets you rank accounts by quality, and to measure the quality of each rep’s book of accounts.

The hard part is defining the scoring formula itself and weighting the different factors. Start by thinking about what your ideal customer looks like, and what indicators exist in your CRM application that suggest higher or lower potential. Some potential factors to use in your formula might include:

• Account’s industry
• Account’s size
• Number of contacts in the CRM application for the account, and their seniority
• Frequency and recency of marketing interactions (e.g. content downloads, event attendance)
• Past sales interactions

You’ll want to build your formula into your CRM application directly, or into your distribution application, if it will be separate from your CRM.

Parameter #5: Output

Lastly, you need to define how your automated account redistribution solution should deliver its results.

You may want it to output CSV (comma separated values) text files, which you can review and analyze before implementing any changes in your CRM application. Alternatively, if your solution is built inside your CRM or can interface with it, you might want the application to make changes directly in the CRM. I would caution against this route until you are confident in how your solution performs.

Is Automation for Everyone?

Account distribution can be a charged subject in many sales organizations, and an automated approach as described here is not right for all sales teams. In an industry with a small number of accounts per rep, and a complex, high-touch selling model, sales leaders might want to reiew and finalize assignment decisions themselves, one-by-one. But for organizations building large books of accounts for SDR teams, automation may be a compelling way to cut the overhead and person-hours needed for this important task.

Wrapping Up: Case Study

The approach outlined above is not theoretical - it can be applied in real practice.

For a recent client project, I developed a simple command-line application, for use by the sales operations team, to automate account distribution. It successfully “shuffled” thousands of Salesforce account records to build account books of 350-500 accounts for an SDR team with dozens of reps. The resulting account books were within a handful of percentage points of each other in terms of “quality”, as measured by the account score.

The application manages all interaction with Salesforce - extracting the data it needs for its analysis, and updating Salesforce with the results of the distribution. This eliminates the manual work and error risk associated with juggling account spreadsheets.

Considering how to automate your own account distribution process? I would love to discuss your project and help you figure out how to achieve your objectives.