We frequently get the question…What is the ideal number of zones that a field professional should have? There is no hard and fast rule across the board, and there will likely be variability depending on the distribution channel you cover and the product set you offer.
However, there is a disciplined way to try to approach the ideal number of zones for you.
Remember why you did territory management in the first place. Zone construction, developing your route, or milk run, is designed to help you see the greatest number of the right producers and prospects in the most time efficient manner possible. It also assists you in having a productive day each and every day.
We recommend you work backwards. Let’ say you want to have five appointments every day. And let’s further say that for you to get those 5 appointments you classically have to call about 15 different advisors with a scheduling success rate of about 33%. So the minimum number of advisors you would need to have in your zone, in order to have five appointments each day, is 15.
Next let’s examine the total number of producers and prospects you wish to cover during the course of a year. Let’s presume that number is 240, a fairly sizeable number. Quite frankly it would be brutal to try and cover 240 people with any level of activity. But it is not an unrealistic number of the total universe of advisors that you might try to develop in the course of a year.
If you take the 15 advisors, and divide it into the total number of advisors you wish to cover (240), the optimal number of zones in this example would be 15. In real life you are not going to have exactly 15 advisors in every zone. You might have zones that include far more advisors, and that’s fine. Once the number of advisors starts to exceed double the number — in our example you get 30+ advisors in a zone — we might encourage you to divide that geography into two zones.
There are also areas that are geographically undesirable, or not well developed where you have far fewer than 15 advisors or prospects. We don’t refer to those areas as zones, we refer to them as “outliers”. We address strategies for covering “outliers” in another blog post.
The simple truth is that in order to try to define the ideal number of zones for you, start first by determining how many appointments you wish to conduct each day. Be honest with yourself about your scheduling success rate. That will give you a good indication of the ideal (minimal) number of producers and prospects required to make it worth your while to travel to that zone. Dividing that minimum number into the total universe of producers and prospects that you wish to cover in your territory over the course of the year, should then give you a very good indication of the number of zones that are best suited for you.