Cambridge University Press (CUP) is a world-leading international education publisher, providing educational materials, resources and services to teachers and learners, from ages 3-19, in over 160 countries.

CUP is another of our longest standing clients, and was one of the earliest adopters of our SPIRIT sales and marketing application. CUP wanted help to analyse their existing schools customers, identify a list of target prospects and then allocate these evenly into six existing rep territories so that each territory had a similar number of prospect schools.

Having completed the initial analysis, we identified CUP’s warmest prospects using a combination of historical sales data, Ofsted grade, performance and funding information, all generated from CUP’s SPIRIT application. Next, we wrote an algorithm that balanced the allocation of schools between the six rep territories so that each territory contained a similar number of schools.

Although some local rep knowledge resulted in some tweaking to the initial territories, our proposed allocation formed the basis of CUP’s sales territories throughout a trial of one complete academic year.

As sales from prospect schools increased, it became apparent that further reps would be required in order to service them effectively. In this second phase, we were asked to look again at the list of prospect schools, and identify the optimum locations where a further six sales reps should be based. These locations were then used during CUP’s recruitment drive, which resulted in a further six reps being appointed. Once in post, we redrew the territories to accommodate the six additional reps, so that target prospects were spread evenly across the twelve new territories.

The segmentation and rep territory allocation has proved extremely successful. After one full year in place, the twelve territories have now been revised slightly and have just entered their second year of operation. We will continue to monitor sales performance from the prospect schools, and revise the target schools list accordingly.