Sales territory planning is the work of deciding which doctors each medical representative (MR) visits, and how often. A territory is the area, and the list of doctors, that one MR covers. In Indian pharma, each territory is built around a headquarters, the town where the MR lives and starts each working day. The plan is one part of pharma commercial analytics.
The plan starts from data about doctors. For each doctor, the company estimates how many prescriptions the doctor writes for the kind of medicine it sells. It then sorts the doctors into grades. Grade A doctors write the most prescriptions, grade B the next most, and grade C the rest. Each grade gets a number of visits a month. The plan must also fit what one MR can actually do. An MR can visit about 11 doctors a day, on about 22 working days a month.
Consider a company that sells heart and diabetes medicines in western Madhya Pradesh. It has 3,000 doctors on its list. Of these, 400 are grade A, to be visited four times a month, which makes 1,600 visits. Another 1,000 are grade B, visited twice a month, which makes 2,000 visits. The remaining 1,600 are grade C, visited once, which makes 1,600 visits. The total is 5,200 visits a month. One MR can make about 240 visits a month. So the company needs about 22 MRs.
The software then draws the 22 territories. Each territory should hold about 240 visits a month. Each should also keep travel short, so the software groups doctors by road distance from each headquarters. It reads maps of roads and clinic locations for this. Reading such location data is the subject of geospatial AI. A territory inside Indore city may cover a few square kilometres. A rural territory may cover a whole district, with fewer doctors and longer drives. The order of visits on each day is then planned by route optimisation software.
Territories must also be fair, because each MR's sales target is set by territory. An MR's bonus depends on meeting that target. If one territory has many more high-prescribing doctors than another, one MR earns a bonus easily and the other cannot. So the plan is checked with incentive compensation management software, which turns each target and each month's sales into the MR's bonus.
Plans are redrawn once or twice a year. Doctors move, new hospitals open, and a new medicine may need visits to different specialists. Each MR's actual visits are recorded in the field sales software. So the next plan can compare the visits planned with the visits made.