The windshield economy: what an hour in the truck actually costs
A field rep spends roughly half their working hours driving. Until you price that honestly, every territory decision is wrong.
Ask a field manager how much an hour of rep time costs. They'll give you a number based on salary plus commission. They'll be off by a factor of two, because they forgot about the truck.
The real cost of an hour
A rep's fully-loaded cost per hour includes comp, benefits, truck lease or mileage, phone, laptop, software, management overhead, and training. For most field orgs that's $80-$140 per productive hour.
But half those hours are spent driving. Which means the real cost per meeting hour is double the on-paper number. That $120/hour rep is really $240 per hour of actual selling.
Why this matters for territory design
A territory with five accounts in a ten-mile radius is not "worse" than a territory with twenty accounts spread across a state. It might be better. The ten-mile territory lets the rep run four visits a day. The sprawling one lets them run two.
Every mile of drive time is a tax on selling time. Most companies pretend it's free because the rep is salaried. The rep doesn't have the luxury of pretending.
The operational fix
Cluster stops. Set a rule: no visit happens in isolation unless the account is worth at least X revenue. If a rep has to drive an hour for a small account, batch it with two other small accounts along the same corridor.
This is what route planning is actually for. Not "pretty blue lines on a map." Cost reduction. The rep who runs six clustered stops in a day is twice as productive as the rep who runs three scattered ones — for the same drive time.