In his recent Substack post, Taking the Terror out of Territories, Hayes Davis compared sales territory planning to a horror movie, the kind with spreadsheets instead of jump scares. He unpacked why carving territories feels so painful, from messy data to tangled dependencies to politics. Hidden inside that post was a short but profound analogy: territory planning is a knapsack problem.
Hayes later expanded on that in a LinkedIn post that drew a big reaction across the RevOps community. He explained that the knapsack problem, something computer science undergrads learn early, perfectly mirrors what happens every year in territory planning. It’s about maximizing value within limited capacity, whether you’re filling a backpack or balancing sales potential across your reps.
Let’s unpack that idea and why it actually makes you feel better about the chaos.
The knapsack problem, explained in plain english
Imagine you’ve got a backpack with limited space. In front of you are dozens of items, each with a different size and value. You need to decide which combination of items to pack so you maximize total value without overloading the bag.
There’s no shortcut or perfect formula because as soon as you add one more item, the number of possible combinations explodes exponentially. That’s why the knapsack problem is famous: it represents a class of optimization puzzles that are incredibly hard to solve exactly.
Now swap “items” for accounts, “weight” for rep capacity, and “value” for revenue potential.
Every RevOps leader knows the feeling: you’re staring at a mountain of accounts, trying to assign them so no rep is overwhelmed, every territory is fair, and overall revenue potential is maximized. Every tweak a new rule, an updated ICP tag, a new strategic segment shifts the whole balance.
Why this analogy matters for revops
Recognizing territory planning as a knapsack problem changes the mindset from frustration to focus. It reframes “impossible” as “computationally difficult” and that’s empowering.
Here’s why:
1. It forces clarity and prioritization
You can’t optimize for everything. The knapsack lens pushes RevOps and GTM leaders to define what “value” really means. Is it ARR potential, logo growth, market coverage, or expansion upside?
2. It encourages rules-based design
As Hayes joked in his post, you can either “have AI do the complicated math” like with Gradient Works’ new Carve or “endlessly update a spreadsheet by hand.” The point isn’t that tools solve everything, but that algorithms can systematize fairness
3. It exposes weak strategy
If your ICP segmentation or GTM focus isn’t clear, your territory model will crumble fast. The knapsack problem reminds you that optimization is only as good as the rules that define what “good” looks like.
4. It normalizes iteration over perfection
There’s no perfect solution, the goal becomes approximation and adaptation. You design, test, adjust, repeat.
The bigger lesson
RevOps leaders live in a world where math meets human emotion. Territory design sits squarely at that intersection. It’s why even the cleanest spreadsheet can cause conflict and why no model survives first contact with reality.
Understanding the knapsack problem helps teams stop chasing the fantasy of a “perfect carve” and start building resilient systems that evolve with their data, strategy, and people.
Hayes was right: this stuff is “stupid hard.” But that’s not a reason to despair, it’s a reason to modernize how we approach it.
