7 Simple Steps to Tap New Territory

In business, there is always pressure to gain higher market share and profitable sales. To fulfill both these objectives, it is important to have good presence in all territories so to do this; we have to penetrate into new territories to explore the opportunities provided by that territory. To get entry into new territory and start from the scratch to start sales is always a big challenge as sometimes we have to deal with competitors who already have long dominant presence in the similar territory. This calls for another challenge which is to get positioning into consumer’s mind space and then product/brand acceptability.

Keeping how challenging it is to build strong product presence into new territory into consideration following measures to be taken in steps for an effective execution and rewarding sales.

 Set Your Target
• First, set goals for this new territory like what sales company is expecting from this new territory in first 6 months and in next 2 years? Company has to be patient and has to give adequate time to understand and develop the market.

Know Your Customer
• Study customer first to know what they think about you as a brand. You will get to know brand-customer mind reach gap which may further help you build your action plan.
• Find out the pain areas of customers of new territory in terms of product-service-need gap.

Know Your Competitors
• Study what competition has been doing good in that territory to get the major market share
• Find out weak areas of competitions like poor service, customer dissatisfaction, product complaints, poor customer handling, higher price of the product etc.

Fix your Communication Strategy
• Launch your brand/product campaign in phases highlighting USPs of your product/service. This should cover all strengths of yours and pain areas of competition.
• Remember, this campaign design and execution should be creative and appealing enough to become talk of the town. This should actually strike the market and competition too.

Sales Execution Strategy
• Assign dedicated and adequate sales reps to cover market and also to give assurance of all time presence to targeted market and customers both.
• It is very important that sales team should be trained and motivated enough to make sure that they must have long term commitment and will not flee away while facing tough situations.
• Tie up with other local influential channels which have long time presence in that territory and also are directly/indirectly play a vital role in your product sales life cycle.
• Last but not the least, it is very important to have all your top management, backend sales staff and other sales dept. to be extra cautious besides being active and responsive enough when it comes to supporting this territory.

Focus on Customer Delightness
• Focus on increasing customer touch points to ensure not to miss single customer query and also to ensure speedy customer query resolution.
• Start addressing customer’s issues in a personal manner and thereby building confidence amongst consumer’s mind.

Reexamine Market
• Restudy the market at regular intervals to know the changing market trends besides knowing customer needs – product fitment gap and take corrective measures to meet customer expectations for better market penetration.

 

Planning is worth nothing unless executed efficiently so it is very important to have smooth and timely execution of the planning which in turn help to have profitable sales and higher market share.