Territory and account coverage
Territories reflect how the company grew, not where the orders now come from. The map is defended by the people on it, and nobody above them has a reason to redraw it.
Industrial & Manufacturing
Territories follow who was there. The installed base moved on.
Sales territory planning in manufacturing rarely happens: the map took shape around whoever was there. Which plants and service contracts each rep holds was settled once and never reopened.
Sector read
Twenty-two years of accounts in one sheet.
In a company like this, a regional manager retires after twenty-two years and the handover is a spreadsheet of account names. Who to call at each plant, which specification the buyer will not read, when the maintenance budget resets: none of it was written down, because it never had to be. The accounts stay with the region on paper. Three of the largest go quiet within a year.
Coverage was drawn around the people available when the team formed, not around where the installed base sits today, and reopening it feels like taking accounts off people. Applications engineers spend hours on quotes before anyone has checked the order is real, and distributor numbers reach the review without an owner. The leak is the visit nobody made and the renewal nobody asked for.
Where coverage follows history
Coverage is a decision. It was made once.
Territories follow who was there, not where the machines are. The cost is the order never quoted, and it appears in no report because nothing happened.
- 01 · Surface · what gets reported
Coverage that reflects history
Who covers which accounts follows who was there, not where the opportunity sits.
- 02 · Structure · what produces it
A team shaped by who was there
Coverage and roles followed the people available rather than a design.
- 03 · System · where it breaks
Judgement held by a few
The technical judgement sits with a handful of people and does not transfer.
- 04 · Consequence · what it costs
Opportunity never reached
Coverage decided once and carried forward stops matching the market it was drawn for.
The cause and the cost rarely show up in the same place.
What the Diagnosis reads here
Assignment history and win rates, read by territory age.
Who was assigned what, since when, and what each territory has won since, read beside what the regional managers say. Coverage set once and judgement that retires with its owner are where the reading starts.
- Field and applications engineers
- Regional sales managers
- Channel and key-account owners
- Account assignment history
- Distributor handoffs
- Win rates by territory age
Technical products are sold on relationships here, which is why the map goes unreopened; the territory and capacity planning that should sit behind it is read on the GTM Strategy page.
What tends to break first
The map goes first; the renewals follow it.
A sales team shaped by tenure keeps its shape long after the installed base has moved. What nobody designed is what leaks first.
Translating between engineers and buyers
The applications engineer knows the specification; the plant manager holds the maintenance budget. Getting from one to the other depends on a few people.
Concentrated judgement
What makes a quote turn into an order is known to three or four people. Their calendar caps growth before headcount does.
Opportunity that never arrives
The loss is the plant never visited, the frame agreement never quoted, the service contract left to lapse. A CRM records what happened. It has no row for what did not.
The evidence
What a quote leaks, what service pays, what an account is worth.
What slow quoting leaks, what service brings in, what an existing account is worth and what a plant carries in hidden cost. The plants your map misses are counted only in your own assignment history.
- 01
5% of revenue
The average share of annual revenue that US manufacturers estimate they lose to quoting: mispriced quotes, wrong configurations, approval delays and manual entry errors. 86% say slow, manual quoting has cost them deals.
Aleran with TrendCandy, 2025 Built to Sell Report, 200 senior leaders at mid-sized and large US B2B manufacturers, vendor survey, July 2025, pp. 1 and 6
- 02
About 20%
The share of revenue that service brings a mechanical engineering company, "one of the biggest revenue generators in the sector": the contract left to run out comes out of that fifth.
VDMA, Customer Service topic page and VDMA Benchmarks Customer Service, no survey year given, read 25 October 2026
- 03
45% against 19%
Win rate on expansion deals against new business, 45% to 19%, with a 52-day cycle against 91 and five stakeholders against eight; the sample spans sectors, nothing manufacturing-specific being verifiable, and the installed base is where it bites here.
Ebsta and Pavilion, GTM Benchmarks Report 2025, 655,000 opportunities at 387 companies, vendor survey, March 2025, p. 23
- 04
EUR 20,600 a head
A metallurgy company in ISEOR's cases carried EUR 20,600 of hidden cost per person per year, 80% of its payroll, in 2008 euros: an industrial example of the figure the Diagnosis produces for your commercial team.
ISEOR, Savall and Zardet, "Le concept de coût-valeur des activités", Sciences de Gestion 64, Figure 2, p. 75, 2008 values
What happens next
Three ways in; the usual one is the Diagnosis.
Diagnosis
€15,000 flat · two months from the day we get access
Field engineers, regional managers and channel owners interviewed; assignment history and win rates by territory age read beside them. It ends in what unreached plants and lapsed renewals cost at the salaries you pay, and which territory to reopen first.
Book a strategy callDetails →Operation
€50,000 more within 30 days of the Diagnosis briefing · €65,000 with it included
Nine months reopening coverage with your regional managers, one territory at a time, every change owned and dated, win rates tracked from the first territory reopened.
Explore Operation →Executive Workshop
Three hours, the people who can redraw the map, ten at most, the one problem named before any CRM export. €5,000, credited in full against a Diagnosis or an Operation booked within 30 days.
Explore the Workshop → FAQ
Before you assume long tenure means no risk.
Our senior reps have decades of relationships, isn't that a strength rather than a risk?
It is a strength until it is the only thing holding the account. The Diagnosis does not question the relationships. It asks what happens to the accounts, and to the know-how, on the day one of those people retires.
Our sales team grew out of engineering, does this still apply?
Yes. The Diagnosis reads how orders and service contracts are won and renewed as it works now, whatever the team grew out of.
A quote can take a year to become an order. What can two months show?
Which territories produce orders and which only produce quotes. Assignment history and win rates by territory age already carry that pattern; the two months read it, and the interviews say why it holds.
Do you need to understand our specific technical product?
Enough to read how it is sold, not to engineer it. The work is about the way orders are won around the product, and the technical depth that needs comes out of the interviews.
Get started
Tenure drew the map. A number says what the map misses.
Thirty minutes on how the territories were drawn, what they now miss, and whether your assignment history shows it. If redrawing them is the answer, you hear it on the call, not in a proposal.