At a Glance

• Most vendor territories are artifacts of hiring history. They were drawn around where somebody lived, then patched every time a rep left, and nobody has recut them since.
• The unit of coverage that matters is not distance. It is decision cadence — how often a dealer makes a choice about where to send a deal, and whether anyone from the program is present when they do.
• A field rep carrying 140 dealer accounts is not covering 140 dealers. They are covering twelve and responding to inbound from everyone else.
• The answer to the long tail is not termination. It is changing what it costs to serve them, which is a routing decision rather than a relationship decision.

How Territories Actually Got Drawn