Demonstration | Territory Planning
Launch Territory Planning
How do you design sales territories before there's a single sale to learn from? A data-informed approach built on market opportunity, not gut feel.
A launch team gets one chance to draw the map. Before a single prescription exists, someone has to decide how the country is divided between sales representatives. Once territories are established and targets are set, they're difficult to change.
The challenge is balancing three components: commercial opportunity, representative workload and geographic practicality. Get the balance wrong and some territories become overloaded while others remain underutilised, affecting both field effectiveness and launch performance.
Without historical sales data, territory design often relies on previous brand structures or informed judgement.
Which raises an important question:
Why were the boundaries drawn this way?
If the answer isn't clear, the territory design becomes difficult to justify
to the representative questioning whether their territory is fair, or
to leadership asking whether resources have been allocated effectively.
The Challenge
This concept is built around Ricardis, a fictional newly PBS-listed oral therapy for chronic kidney disease associated with type 2 diabetes. Treatment initiation is specialist-led, requiring a national field force of ten territories.
With no historical sales available, market opportunity is estimated using three complementary datasets: synthetic analogue sales, NDSS diabetes registrations, and specialist distribution. Together they provide a practical view of where demand is likely to emerge after launch.
While the brand and scenario are fictional, the planning approach reflects how pharmaceutical field territories are commonly designed.
The scenario
How as opportunity estimated?
Rather than relying on a single metric, the model combines three complementary indicators of future demand:
Analogue market sales (45%) - a proxy for current prescribing behaviour.
Specialist distribution (35%) - weighted to reflect clinical influence and market access.
NDSS type 2 diabetes registrations (20%) - representing underlying disease burden and longer-term opportunity.
Each postcode receives a composite opportunity score. Similar neighbouring postcodes are grouped into practical clusters before being consolidated into balanced sales territories.
The model provides a strong starting point, not the final answer. Travel patterns, local market knowledge and field feedback should also be consider in refining the final territory structure.
The goal is to combine analytical rigor with commercial judgement to create territories that are both data-informed and practical to execute.
The approach
Every postcode receives an opportunity score, providing a detailed picture of market potential before territories are formed.
Neighbouring postcodes grouped into practical clusters, ready for territory design.
Launch Territory Planning
The proposed territory structure, showing opportunity balance, variance from target, and the drivers behind every allocation.
The model produced ten balanced territories that provided a transparent and defensible starting point for launch.
While seven territories met the target balance of ±5%, some variation was intentionally accepted where preserving geographic practicality resulted in a better field structure. The goal wasn't mathematical perfection—it was creating territories that would work in the real world.
As the product matures, the same framework can be refreshed using actual sales and engagement data, allowing the territory design to evolve alongside the market.
The outcome
Facing something similar?
If launching a new product, redesigning sales territories, or trying to make better decisions from fragmented data, let's talk.