The start of a new year means a new book of business.
Fresh accounts. Clean slate. Same quiet pressure:
“Alright… what do I do first?”
This is actually one of my favorite moments in the job, because it’s where I get to think asymmetrically and stack the odds in my favor.
One key lesson I took from my time in the military (and one Sun Tzu famously noted) is this: never fight a fair fight. You want as many unfair advantages as possible.
I think this way because I see salespeople as investors.
We invest time, energy, attention, reputation, and sometimes even our own cash (I see you, B2C hustlers), into bets we hope will pay off.
Put all your chips on one account and it goes bust? That’s a one-way ticket to PIPtown.
I’m not a finance guy, but I know enough about investing to know a few fundamentals apply to territory planning too.
So today, I’ll be reviewing my 6 step approach to territory planning to help you maximize your time and hit the ground running in 2026.
Step 1: Analyze Your Account List
Before we start prospecting, we need a plan of attack. That starts with analyzing your list’s data quality and understanding what’s actually in the book:
- Clean up your list - Look for obvious duplicates, clearly mislabeled accounts, or anything blatantly wrong. Cull those out to deal with later.
- Spot Patterns and Segment - Check for things like employee count, revenue, locations, industry, business priorities, and past opportunities. Your target ICP will likely have similarities across these areas, thus helping you prioritize where to spend your time.
Step 2: Build your shortlist
You’ve heard it before: the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
After reviewing the book in bulk, start building your shortlist, what I call my hit list.
This first list should include the low-hanging fruit, accounts that immediately jump off the page, such as those with:
- Multiple prior opportunities
- Mutual investors or warm intros
- Strong resemblance to existing case-study customers
I personally target a Top 20%, based on the 80/20 rule. Your list might be 2 accounts or 200—what matters is proportion, not absolute size.
Once you have your shortlist, you can also start cleaning the data and making sure you have everything ready to take action.
Better to do that now with a smaller list we know will get actioned, than to do it on the entire list which might create wastage.
Step 3: Rank the shortlist against your hypothesis
Now we need to decide where to start by building a hypothesis.
I recently talked about this on episode 529 of 30MPC: how to build a hypothesis around the compelling events most likely to drive your largest and fastest deals.
It reminds me of the Abraham Lincoln quote:
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
The hypothesis is the axe. It helps us spend fewer precious resources by focusing our time where it actually matters, so our precious energy isn’t wasted on randomness.
Right now, my working hypothesis is this:
My time produces the most revenue when I target accounts most likely to pursue mergers and acquisitions.
Given this hypothesis, I uploaded my shortlist into ChatGPT and asked it to score each account from 1–5 based on likelihood of M&A activity with a global footprint in 2026, and to explain its reasoning so I could sanity-check it.
That lets me sort my Top 20% into execution chunks and get immediate feedback on whether my hypothesis holds up.
Personally, I target five accounts every two weeks from that Top 20%, with the goal of clearing four (a clear yes or a clear no). One lingering account is normal, because we won’t always get in contact with every account.
Step 4: Call your plays
Now it’s time to put on your detective hat.
Imagine trying to enter a building. You try the front door, but it’s locked. Side door is locked, too. Window? Possible, but painful.
Accounts are the same. Not all paths are created equal.
I call these paths plays, like a playbook. Different plays require different effort, cost, and probability of success:
- An executive-to-executive introduction
- A former customer who just joined the account
- A tailored event or paid campaign
If one of those options exists and you’re still banging your head against cold outreach that lands in spam, that’s… not ideal.
Building your playbook should follow this simple principle: least effort for the highest return.
I typically call three plays per account and run them in order: primary, secondary, tertiary.
Calling them before execution keeps everyone aligned (SDRs, marketing, events, exec sponsors) and builds momentum.
Step 5: Run your plays
Execute in order. Try the primary play. If it fails, cross it off and move to the secondary. If that fails, move to the tertiary.
If all three fail, the account is cleared and can be recycled later into nurture or volume motions.
This is the shortest section because you already know what to do here: get to work!
Step 6: Iterate and refill
Once you’ve cleared your Top 20%, you’ll have real feedback on your hypothesis.
Were you right? Close, but not quite? Completely off?
That’s the point of having a clear hypothesis – you can make small adjustments without missing hidden upside.
Refine it. Then start again at Step 2.
Conclusion
Taking an intentional approach to territory planning allows you to:
- Minimize wasted energy—your most precious resource
- Find the 10% of active or soon-to-be buyers
- Exhaustively work your accounts, leaving no stone unturned
Hope this brings some method to the madness of a new year in sales.
Now go crush 2026. 💪
Luke Floyd
I've been in sales for about 15 years, and am currently an Enterprise seller at Deel, a global hiring & payroll company. By harnessing my varied background in the military, door to door sales, musical theater, and competitive debate, I'm on a mission to be the best sales rep people know in their network. In that journey, I've built my own personal operating system for high performance (IGST), and my own sales methodology (Change-Based Selling). These systems have made me a top rep multiple years, averaging 175% over five years at Deel, and allowed me to do it my way. You can find out more about me and my sales/performance coaching at IGST.me.
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