Dynamic Territory Management and Account Segmentation using Machine Learning: Strategies for Maximizing Sales Efficiency in a U.S. Zonal Network

Abstract

In the context of Enterprise B2B sales, a company usually sells its products or services to large and diverse organizations (enterprises). Enterprise Customers often have global reach and complex hierarchical structure made up of several decision-making units. Consequently, Enterprise Customers comprise of several Customer Locations (offices, headquarters, production plants, stores etc.) to which the company sells its products or services. To maximize sales potential and other business objectives, it is suggested that each Enterprise Customer Location must be managed by the company and assigned a couple of relevant sales representatives. This activity is called Territory Management. Additionally, any company should have well-defined set of Customer Segmentation criteria that help identify the most valuable Customer Locations that need to have defined Territory Management strategy. The Customer Location Segmentation activity is done to deliver Territory Management configuration specific to each Customer Location and dedicated to small set of key products to one or couple of sales reps. In both cases (Territory Management and Segmentation), the number of supported markets is constantly increasing along with the volume of data. The current analytical task is not trivial and requires a significant computational power, as it takes into account various datasets and a lot of diversity. To address these problems, we share a robust in-depth methodological approach based on the Machine Learning methods. It is already implemented to solve CLS and Territory Management automation tasks for different types of B2B companies operating in various sectors on several datasets ranging from 10k to 2M of Customer Locations and Territory Management tasks have been repeatedly performed with up to 95% of accuracy and F1 score. The goal of this paper is to provide the best practices in Dynamic Territory Management and Customer Segmentation for Enterprise B2B companies willing to design the future of their enterprise segment to face the new challenges of the market and embrace the digital era.