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Here's a question about sales territory disputes that'll make your head spin: What do you do when overlapping territories and shared relationships turn your sales team into a collection of lone wolves fighting over who owns what?
That's the exact predicament faced by Kayla Lujan, VP of Sales at Down to Earth Landscape and Irrigation, in Orlando, Florida. Her team manages defined territories, but their business model creates inevitable crossover with HOA managers who oversee multiple properties spanning across different reps' territories.
As she put it: "I've really seen the team kind of lose focus on working as one or team selling and more of … a what's mine versus working together."
If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. Territory disputes are one of the most destructive forces in sales organizations, and they're costing companies their collaborative culture and their best deals.
The Psychology Behind Sales Territory Wars
Salespeople are wired to win. And when territories overlap, that competitive drive turns inward, creating internal battles that hurt everyone.
I learned this lesson the hard way when I was a VP of sales managing local and regional account executives. We had big regional accounts sitting in local territories, and the fighting was relentless. Local reps would work around the system, hide opportunities, and go through back doors to protect "their" accounts.
The result? We lost major deals because the wrong person with insufficient skills was working them solo, or we'd win the business only to have explosive commission disputes after the fact.
But here's what shocked me most: When we gave people the choice between money or credit on the ranking report, they fought harder over the credit than the commission. They'd forgo 100% money but wage war over who got recognition for closing the deal.
That tells you everything you need to know about sales psychology. It's not just about money—it's about winning, recognition, and status.
The Real Cost of Territorial Thinking
Territory disputes create uncomfortable team meetings and destroy your sales effectiveness in three critical ways:
Lost Deal Value: When the wrong rep works a deal alone because they're protecting their turf, you lose the collective expertise that could close bigger opportunities.
Relationship Damage: Customers get confused when multiple reps approach them without coordination, making your organization look disorganized and unprofessional.
Top Performer Exodus: Your best salespeople get frustrated with the politics and infighting, leading them to seek opportunities at companies with better team cultures.
The companies that figure this out win big. The ones that don't hemorrhage talent and revenue to organizations that actually know how to build high-performing sales teams.
The Solution: Strategic Commission Pools and Clear Ownership
For Kayla's HOA challenge—and similar overlapping territory situations—here's the framework that actually works:
Assign Relationship Ownership: The rep with the core relationship (the HOA headquarters contact) owns account retention and expansion. They're responsible for keeping that account long-term and get compensated accordingly.
Create Local Opportunity Roles: Local reps in each territory focus on building relationships with on-site contacts—facility managers, groundskeepers, community center staff. They get compensated for new project acquisition and spot opportunities within their geographic area.
Implement Commission Pools: Instead of fighting over who gets what percentage, create a commission pool for each major account. The pool gets divided based on roles and contributions, not territorial claims.
Force Up-Front Agreements: Here's the crucial part: Make involved parties agree on commission splits before any work begins. Post-deal disputes are exponentially harder to resolve than pre-deal agreements.
The Leadership Mindset Shift
The hardest part of solving territory wars is the leadership mindset required to manage them effectively.
As I told Kayla, moving into VP-level roles means stepping into two worlds simultaneously. You need to be tactical enough to manage these day-to-day disputes, while being strategic enough to build systems that prevent them.
The tactical side requires you to be King Solomon when reps can't agree, making decisions that nobody loves but everyone can live with. The strategic side means creating compensation structures and territory designs that naturally encourage collaboration.
But here's what most new sales leaders miss: You're not just managing sales processes anymore. You're part of the executive team, and your territory decisions impact operations, finance, and overall business strategy. Your sales leadership needs to balance team dynamics with business objectives.
The "We Win as a Team" Reality Check
I tell my team constantly: "We win as a team." And yes, fistfights still ensue. The phrase doesn't magically solve territorial disputes, but it sets the expectation that collaboration is the standard, not the exception.
Leadership sometimes means repeating yourself until you're blue in the face, then getting up and repeating yourself some more. The message needs to be consistent: Individual wins that hurt team performance are losses for everyone.
This requires recognizing and rewarding collaborative behavior publicly while addressing territorial behavior privately and directly. You can't let territorial thinking fester because it spreads faster than good teamwork habits.
Your Action Plan
If you're dealing with territory wars:
Audit Your Current Structure: Map out where overlaps occur and which accounts create the most disputes. These are your highest priority fixes.
Design Commission Pools: Create clear, written agreements about how shared opportunities will be compensated before deals begin.
Define Relationship Ownership: Establish who owns which relationships and what their responsibilities are for retention versus expansion.
Invest in Team Culture: Make collaboration a measured and rewarded behavior, not just something you talk about in meetings.
The companies that solve the territory puzzle don't eliminate competition—they channel it toward the right targets. Instead of fighting each other, your team fights together to win more business and serve customers better.
That's how you transform territorial lone wolves into a collaborative pack that dominates your market.
For more insights on building effective sales teams and leadership strategies, explore our sales management training programs on Sales Gravy University.