Draw between the lines: How to create territories for medical device teams

A territory might be a single city. It might span several states. Or maybe, the way reps look at it, it’s something in between. A mix of metro areas, key systems, and high-value pockets they’ve scouted over time.

While most reps have a clearly defined territory, it takes some nuance to work it efficiently. You might have dense hospital clusters in one pocket, a key ASC just over the county line, or referral patterns that don’t care about borders. So while the territory map may look tidy on paper, actually working it requires more creativity and flexibility.

Let’s say you’re a rep based in Columbia, MO, and your territory spans several states. You're planning a trip to Kansas City and you’re targeting orthopods performing a high volume of knee replacements. You know you want to hit locations across both Kansas and Missouri, and include facilities in Overland Park like AdventHealth Shawnee Mission and Kansas City Bone & Joint Clinic. 

But mapping out the best opportunities for your trip to KC with the usual options? Good luck.

Yet you can do exactly that when you’re looking to buy a house. Here’s what that looks like on Zillow:

Let’s bring more of that energy (and less of that 7% interest rate) to med device sales.

Now You Can Just Draw It

You shouldn't have to constrain your prospecting by boundaries like a 50-mile radius or state lines. Those divisions don’t reflect the reality of how you sell.

With MedScout, you can map out the opportunity in the Kansas City metro area the way you actually want to work it. We need to:

• Capture Kansas City across the Missouri/Kansas state line, which also spans two counties
• Bring in Overland Park, which actually has a higher population than Kansas City, KS
• Spot any other opportunities along the way

On the last point, we can throw a heat map over the area to identify where we should concentrate our time.

Good thing we drew the map the way we did. We would have missed out on some of the highest-volume surgeons in the Leawood area any other way.

Now that you have your targets, you can plan your KC route right in MedScout. Most of these providers split their time across multiple facilities, so we created Visit Planner to show you what location they're most likely to be at on each day of the week. 

We know exactly who to target and when and where to find them.

Now what does this mean for sales leadership? Building territories around how reps actually sell leads to better coverage, less friction, and smarter use of field time. Just handing someone a state or a metro area might check a box, but it doesn’t always set them up to win. This approach gives your team the flexibility to focus on where the real opportunities are.

We're always looking for ways to make the sales process more efficient and better aligned with how reps actually work in the field.

Got an idea? We’d love to hear it. tips@medscout.io