When the number of prospects has been determined, each territory should be blocked out with a view to making all parts as accessible as possible from some central starting point. Such a system will diminish the amount of railroad fares and enable the salesman to get to his headquarters more frequently. This is especially important when the salesman has a family. Territories in the East are fairly compact -while those in sparsely settled districts in the West may cover a considerable area and necessitate much traveling. In other words, the number of prospects in an ideal terri tory in the West will be smaller than the number in an ideal eastern territory. In apportioning terri tory, it is well to make sure that each salesman has just a trifle more than he can comfortably handle, rather than less. At first glance this may appear wasteful, but human nature must always be taken' into consideration, and nothing will stifle a salesman's am bition or destroy his spirit more quickly than a too restricted working area.
12. Factors to consider in territory readjustments.
—The utmost diplomacy should be used in dividing a salesman's territory or taking away parts of it, once it has been assigned to him. It is the consensus of opinion that this cannot be done arbitrarily if the salesman is to be left satisfied and is to continue his work with the right spirit. Here again human nature must be considered and in practice it will be found advantageous to let territories 'continue larger than they theoretically should be in preference to under mining the spirit of the selling organization and pos sibly losing some of its best men thru an ill-advised apportionment of territory.
There is a certain concern in Chicago which sells a nationally advertised brand of clothing. The his tory of this firm is an interesting one. Most of its salesmen have been with the house since its infancy and have grown old and gray in the service. In the early days, work was done in a more or less haphazard fashion—no definite territory was assigned, but each man traveled thru the section of the country which seemed to need him most. As a consequence, today each member of the sales force covers practically the entire country, calling upon the trade which he hap pens to have built up in the earlier days. The men cross and recross one another's tracks, and naturally railroad bills and expense accounts are much higher than they would be under the restricted-territory plan. The house, anxious to correct the condition, called in an outside sales counselor, who spent some time in giv ing the situation very careful study. Fortunately for the firm, this man was sufficiently broad-gauged to report that while the present method of covering the country was not as efficient as it might be, he doubted whether a change to a restricted-territory sys tem could be made without undermining the happi ness, and destroying the spirit of the men who had been with the house since the beginning, and to whom the house owed a debt of gratitude for the upbuilding of its business. It was decided, therefore, to continue
along the old lines, changing to the plan of geograph ical territory only as new men were added to the sales organization and excluding from those territories the customers upon whom the old men had been calling for years, until such time as these' older members of the sales force were no longer engaged in selling work. When that time came, and not until then, these old ac counts should be turned over to the younger men.
Another house which has faced the problem in volved in having large territories in the hands of its older men has removed the difficulty by placing junior salesmen in these territories with the consent of the older salesmen and in addition to giving the younger men their regular compensation paying to the older men a small commission on the younger men's busi ness in return for the coaching, direction and inspira tion which the senior salesmen give the beginners. If may be laid down as a principle that a territory, altho it may obviously be too large, should never be divided until the man in charge of the territory—especially if he is a good producer and has been with the house any considerable length of time—has been thoroly sold on the idea and has been convinced that neither his income nor his opportunities of progress will suffer.
13. Routing the salesman in the territor y.—Where the nature of the business is such that the salesman moves rapidly from one town to another, it is becom ing more and more the common practice to route him from the home office, rather than to allow him to plan his own itinerary. This routing must be done with the aid of a railroad map and time-tables, and must be worked out for each individual territory. Natur ally, the routing should be, as far as possible, in a straight line—from one town to the next nearest town where there are prospects. Occasionally, however, such an arrangement entails a considerable loss of time for the salesman because of a disadvantageous train schedule. It is quite possible that he might be com pelled to wait four hours for a train to the next nearest town, which is, let us say, a half-hour distant, whereas he could make a train to a more distant town iminedi ately and double back without any loss of time. The sales manager may sometimes decide to have the sales man travel by carriage or auto from one town to an other, rather than to wait upon the train schedule.