Two reps. Same product. Same training. Same comp plan. One hits 140% of quota three quarters running. The other limps to 60% and gets managed out.
The founder tells this story at every leadership offsite as proof their top performer is special. Nobody in the room asks the question that actually matters: who got the western suburbs, and who got the postcodes with four competitors already embedded and a council zoning dispute freezing half the new builds?
That's the conversation almost nobody has honestly. You don't split territories to be fair. You split them because someone has to own which prospects belong to which rep, and then you build a story afterwards about why the split makes sense. Geography. Vertical. Account size. Whatever framework you pick, it gets dressed up as strategy. Underneath it, most of the time, it's a decision about who wins and who doesn't — made before the map was drawn, not because of it.
The map is a decision about people, not geography
Ask a founder how they split their two-person patch and they'll usually say "Sarah takes north of the river, Mike takes south." Ask why, and the honest answer is rarely strategic. It's usually: Sarah lives north, Mike started first and picked, or the existing client list happened to sit that way when the business was still one person doing everything.
Nobody built that from a model. It accreted. And once it exists, changing it becomes an act of taking something away from a named person, which is a much harder conversation than drawing a line on a map ever was. That's why so many Australian sales teams are still running the territory split someone backed into three years ago, defended today as if it were designed on purpose.
Here's the part that should unsettle you. Andris Zoltners' long-running research on territory alignment — the work that underpins most of the sales operations profession's thinking on this, published originally in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management and expanded across decades of consulting with Fortune 500 sales forces — found that companies could typically grow revenue somewhere between 2% and 7% simply by redesigning territories. Same reps. Same product. Same market. No new hires, no new comp plan, no new training program. Just a better map.
Sit with that. You've spent months agonising over your hiring process, your interview scorecard, your onboarding plan — and there's a lever sitting untouched that moves revenue without you recruiting a single person. Most businesses never pull it, because touching the map means admitting the current one was never really designed. It was inherited.
The luck nobody prices into the scorecard
Every sales manager has watched a "top performer" get promoted, quoted as proof the hiring process works, and then watched that same person flounder the moment they're handed a different patch. And every manager has also watched a rep everyone quietly wrote off suddenly turn credible the day they inherited a warmer patch from someone who left.
Alexander Group's research group has spent years on exactly this question — is it the rep, or is it the territory — and their consistent finding, across the sales forces they study, is that swapping a struggling rep into a stronger territory frequently resolves what looked like a performance problem within a couple of quarters. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that "just performance manage them out" should never be the first move you make.
This matters because of what it implies about the story you tell yourself when someone misses target. Xactly's most recent Sales Compensation Report found 87% of sales teams are struggling to meet or exceed quota, and an earlier Xactly study on SaaS sales specifically found 79% of reps missing their number entirely. Read those figures the way most sales leaders do, and the conclusion is "our people aren't good enough" or "the market's tougher than it used to be." Read them the way the territory data suggests you should, and a different explanation appears: at that scale, missed quota is at least partly a design problem wearing a performance problem's clothes. You cannot have four out of five reps below quota and conclude you've simply hired badly four times in a row. Somewhere in that number is a map that was never rebalanced.
The account that closes itself, and the rep who gets credit for it
Named-account and inherited-territory models create a specific kind of quiet unfairness that almost never gets said out loud in the debrief. A rep who picks up an existing $400,000 account because the previous owner left the business gets credit in this quarter's numbers for relationship equity someone else spent two years building. Meanwhile the rep next to them is cold-calling into a patch with no existing revenue at all, doing harder work for a smaller number, and getting compared on the same leaderboard.
CRM systems record who owns an account. They don't record how much of that account's value the current owner actually created. Ownership and merit get treated as the same thing in most commission structures, and they frequently aren't. If you've ever wondered why your best-paid rep doesn't always feel like your best salesperson, this is usually why. Sales, like most professions people insist is a pure meritocracy, has a fair amount of inheritance quietly built into how it pays out.
Why the American framework doesn't fit an Australian map
Most territory-design content you'll find was written in and for the United States — a market with roughly ten times Australia's population density and sales forces big enough to draw twelve clean regions without anyone's patch looking absurd on a whiteboard. Australia has roughly 3.4 people per square kilometre spread across 7.69 million square kilometres of land, and the overwhelming majority of B2B sales teams here run three to eight reps, not thirty.
Copy a US-style geographic model onto that reality and you get one rep covering an area larger than most European countries while another handles a fifteen-minute radius around the CBD, both scored against the same number. Geography-based splits make sense once you have enough density and enough reps that travel time actually differentiates opportunity. Below that scale, in most of this country, geography is usually the wrong axis entirely — account potential or industry vertical will tell you far more about where the revenue actually sits than a postcode ever will.
What to actually do about it
Run this test before you touch anything. List every current territory next to its total pipeline value and its total number of accounts, not its headcount. If one rep is defending a patch worth three times another rep's, on paper, before either of them has made a single call this quarter, you don't have a performance gap. You have a starting-line gap, and every quota conversation built on top of it is measuring the wrong thing.
Then pick your model deliberately rather than by inheritance. Geography earns its place once you've got enough reps and density that travel time genuinely limits selling hours. Vertical splits build the deepest expertise and the highest win rates, but cost you flexibility if one industry slows down. Account-tier splits — separating your ten biggest accounts from everyone else — protect your best relationships from being under-resourced, but only work if you're honest that the enterprise patch and the SMB patch are not the same job at different sizes; they're two different skill sets wearing the same title. Named-account models reward relationship depth, and they are also the model most likely to quietly hand one rep an unearned head start, so if you run one, audit it against results, not tenure.
Whatever you choose, put a date on when you'll rebalance it. Not "when someone complains." A calendar date, decided in advance, before you know whose favour it will fall in. That single decision — reviewing the map on a schedule instead of in response to a resignation — is the difference between a deliberate structure and one that quietly protects whoever already has the best patch.
The question worth sitting with
Before you have the next conversation about a rep who's missing target, ask yourself honestly: if you swapped that person's territory with your best performer's tomorrow, are you certain the leaderboard would look the same in two quarters? If you're not certain — and most leaders, pressed honestly, aren't — you don't have a people problem yet. You have a map you've never actually tested.
That's an uncomfortable thing to find out about your own business. It's a far better thing to find out from an audit than from another good rep quietly deciding the map isn't worth staying for.
If you suspect your current structure is protecting a few lucky patches more than it's protecting your revenue, that's exactly what SalesHQ's sales team audit is built to uncover — and it pairs well with our guide on how to scale a sales team once the map is actually right.
If you want help diagnosing the real issue — or hiring the right profile for the motion you actually run — talk to SalesHQ, or download the FY2027 Sales Salary Guide.
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