Territory planning in SaaS is one of those things everyone thinks they’ve nailed until the first quarter ends and half the team is either drowning in leads or begging for scraps.
I’ve seen it from every angle: as an AE trying to make quota, as Head of Sales then CRO watching revenue get bottlenecked by bad territory design, and now through the lens of Territories.ai, where we’ve helped dozens of revenue teams rebuild their territory plans from the ground up. Having analyzed more than 400 territory plans from sales teams with 15 reps to entire GTM orgs with more than 250, this is what we've learned about how to build territory plans that actually work well for Sales, SDR, and Customer Success teams, and don’t collapse at the end of Q1.
Most territory plans fail because teams jump straight into drawing lines before having a clear understanding of why those lines exist. The RevOps teams with the most successful plans always start with an alignment session across Sales, RevOps, Marketing, and CS leadership. No maps. No spreadsheets. Just five questions:
If you can’t answer those on one page, you’re not ready for a territory plan. Even for smaller teams, having a strong foundational understanding of where your focus will be next year, and WHY, makes everything else easier.
When this step is skipped, everything downstream breaks:
Once strategy is clear, the next step is data. This is the real kind, that you can verify and validate, not the "gut feel" kind.
Start by calculating your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and slicing it by segment: region, industry, and company size. At our recent Revenue Planning event, Jeff Austin outlined it plainly, “Defining TAM is worthless unless you can act on it.” TAM needs to translate directly into SOM (serviceable opportunity) and equitable account allocations. Use TAM data to shape hiring, coverage, and segmentation, not just slide decks Once that's complete, then layer in where you’ve historically won, by vertical, deal size, and conversion rate.
The goal is to create a coverage heatmap that shows where you’re hot, warm, and cold. When we do this with customers, we almost always find hidden asymmetries: a rep in Texas sitting on triple the TAM of a rep in Boston, or a “mature” region that’s still under-covered because half the accounts aren’t in the CRM.
Bad data means bad territories, and once those lines are drawn, they’re hard to fix without blood on the floor.
There’s unfortunately no perfect territory model, no one territory model to rule them all. What's important is creating an intentional one. You can cut by geography, by company size, by industry, or by product line. The key is to pick a primary and a secondary dimension and be explicit about the trade-offs.
For example, one of our customers, a mid-stage SaaS company, decided to segment primarily by account size (Enterprise, Mid-Market, SMB), then secondarily by geography for time-zone coverage. It meant fewer internal overlaps and cleaner quota alignment.
What matters most is equity, not equality. A fair territory isn’t about giving everyone the same number of accounts. It’s about giving everyone the same opportunity to succeed. When you don’t do that, the performance gap between top and bottom reps becomes a reflection of territory quality, not skill.
This is where the human element comes in. Not every rep is built for every patch. I’ve seen top enterprise sellers thrown into SMB motions and stall out. I’ve also seen new AEs thrive in smaller, simpler patches where they could learn and build confidence.
Territory assignment is matchmaking: experience, language, industry familiarity, and even personality all matter. We use data to ensure each rep’s patch has comparable potential, then layer in the human judgment that makes the plan realistic. And one golden rule: document the “why” behind each assignment. It sounds trivial, but it stops 90% of the internal politics later on.
If you sell a larger ticket item with an SDR/BDR team and haven't planned ahead to sync their operating model with your Account Executives, then territories aren’t synced and friction follows. This is the step where most companies lose control: inbound leads routed to the wrong rep, SDRs cold-calling accounts already in pipeline, and everyone spending more time arguing ownership than talking to customers.
Your SDR coverage model should mirror the AE structure. Every inbound or outbound motion needs clear rules:
Once the routing logic is defined, codify it. Literally put it into your CRM and automation tools. Otherwise, your shiny new plan will crumble under the weight of bad handoffs.
Congrats, 8 weeks of whiteboarding, spreadsheets, excel formulas, and edits and your territories are ready...but that's just for sales.
Territory planning doesn’t end at “Closed Won.” It has to continue through Customer Success: who owns which accounts, how books of business are balanced, and how expansion opportunities are managed. A great CS plan mirrors your Sales plan: segment by size and region, set ARR-based thresholds per CSM, and define ownership asap after the deal closes (if not before).
If you skip this, your customers will experience unclear ownership, delayed onboarding, and inconsistent communication, and a poor onboarding experience is one of the biggest drivers of churn in the first 12 months.
Even the best plan will fail if you roll it out poorly. Communicate early, explain the why, and over-share the details. Give reps their new account lists, territory maps, and quotas at the same time, and make sure every tool (CRM, lead routing, dashboards) reflects the new structure on Day One. Then, check back in after 30, 60, and 90 days.
Markets shift. Headcount changes. People get promoted or leave. A territory plan should be a living system that's reviewed quarterly and adjusted with data.
"But Adam, that's a of work? Why can't we just use the same territory plan we've been using, make some tweaks, and call it good to go?" You absolutely can, but when territory plans go wrong, the damage compounds fast. Let's look at what poorly designed and deployed territories actually do to a GTM team.
A broken territory plan can silently drain millions from a SaaS company, and it's not because people are lazy or incompetent, it's because the system itself is misaligned. Compound that with missing quarterly or annual revenue targets, and now it's someone's job on the line.
Well-designed territory plans changes everything, they create clarity, where every rep knows where to focus They build trust, with leadership able to explain every decision. They drive efficiency, creating coverage improvements without adding headcount Finally, they provide a surprising sense of calm to a part of the business that’s usually chaos.
The right territory plan is less about drawing borders and more about aligning people, data, and strategy. If you get that right, your revenue engine runs smoother, your forecasts get cleaner, and your team actually feels like a team.