If you’ve ever spent Q4 buried in spreadsheets, juggling rep complaints and executive demands, you know the pain of territory planning. It’s complex, political, and emotionally draining.
In his Substack post, Taking the Terror out of Territories, Gradient Works CEO Hayes Davis called the process what it is: a nightmare. He even lived through a nine-month carve that ended in a stalemate, a horror story familiar to anyone in RevOps.
But territory planning doesn’t have to be this bad. You won’t make it fun, but you can make it less terrible, more structured, transparent, and data-driven.
Here’s how.
Step 1: Make time for better data
There’s no such thing as “good” data, only less bad data. And territory planning exposes every flaw. When data is inconsistent, every decision becomes a debate about what’s real instead of what’s right.
Before modeling anything, clean and align your data.
- Enrich accounts with ICP-related details like industry, size, and region.
- Standardize hierarchies so HQs and subsidiaries stay together.
- Agree on required fields early. Adding new ones mid-process triggers chaos.
Your data will never be perfect, just make it consistent and good enough. Timebox this step to keep things moving.
Step 2: Set strategy before the spreadsheet
Most teams start with a spreadsheet. That’s backward. The strategy should come first.
Ask a few critical questions up front:
- Who are our highest-value segments?
- Are we prioritizing expansion, new logos, or both?
- What does good coverage look like by segment?
Without those answers, your model becomes a moving target. Every leadership pivot forces RevOps to start over.
Hayes often points out that “strategy and territories evolving together” is a recipe for chaos.
Tools like Carve help by linking strategy directly to rules. Define ICPs, segmentation, and weighting once, and Carve applies them automatically. When leadership changes direction, you update logic, not rebuild the model.
Step 3: Minimize exceptions
Everyone wants to feel heard during planning season. But too many subjective tweaks, rep holdovers, manager overrides, custom patches turn fairness into politics.
To reduce exceptions:
- Publish rules and criteria early.
- Allow only one round of holdover requests.
- Track every override with rationale—if you can’t justify it, it shouldn’t exist.
Carve makes this easy by recording the logic behind every decision. That transparency shifts conversations from emotion to evidence. When everyone can see why something happened, debates become shorter and saner.
Step 4: Build a continuous not annual process
The biggest mistake? Treating territory planning as an event. Annual carves create pressure for perfection, which never comes.
Progressive GTM teams now use continuous allocation; updating territories dynamically as reps, accounts, and markets change. It’s fairer, faster, and less painful.
With Carve, you can rebalance territories automatically based on capacity and coverage rules. Add a rep mid-quarter? The system redistributes accounts instantly. That means less firefighting, fewer surprises, and a much calmer Q4.
Step 5: Communicate like it's change management
Territory changes feel personal. How you communicate them determines how much friction you face afterward.
Best practices:
- Explain why before what. Lead with reasoning, not rules.
- Equip managers with talking points for consistency.
- Use visualizations, pipeline analytics, coverage maps to show logic clearly.
When people understand the data, they trust the outcome. Transparency builds buy-in faster than perfection ever could.
The takeaway
Territory planning will never be fun, but it can be survivable.
If you invest in data, start with strategy, limit exceptions, and move toward continuous allocation, you’ll shift from reactive chaos to proactive control.
As Hayes says, “You can’t take the terror out of territories entirely, but you can make it a whole lot less terrible.”
