Sales territory data — quick answers

Can I build B2B account territories with this data?#

Partly. The Lists give you the outside half of a territory model: market size, income, growth, migration, and housing for all 3,221 counties and county-equivalents and all 48,490 cities and places. They do not give you a count of your target accounts.

What the data is not. The figures come from the Census Bureau and HUD, and neither carries business counts. If your territories are balanced on the number of accounts in them, that number comes from your CRM.

What to do. Bring your account list, join it to ours on the county FIPS code (county_fips), and use our columns to weight and sanity-check the territories your accounts define. If you sell to households, or to local businesses you reach by area, our half is the denominator and you need nothing else.

For a rough business count, see step 11 of Build balanced sales territories from US counties in Excel or Google Sheets (“households to businesses”). The choice fits in one sentence: use 105.6 businesses per 1,000 residents if one-person businesses are customers, or 18.6 per 1,000 residents if your customer must have employees. Using the first when you meant the second overstates every territory by about 5.7 times.

What should I balance territories on?#

Households (households), for anything sold to a home. Population over-counts markets where households are large, so two counties with the same population can hold very different numbers of buyers. Revenue history balances last year’s territories, not next year’s.

The steps, in order, are in Build balanced sales territories from US counties in Excel or Google Sheets.

County or city?#

Start with counties, then use cities to drill down. Counties are the better unit for building and balancing territories; cities are the better unit for placing a rep inside one.

The two files differ in what they carry:

• County List with Demographics: 122 columns, 62 of them HUD affordability figures (area median income, income limits and fair market rents) for 2021 and 2026. Every county in the 50 states carries a household count, and all but two (Esmeralda County, Nevada, and Kenedy County, Texas) also carry median household income.
• City List with Demographics: 58 columns and no HUD columns. About 28,000 of its 48,490 places carry an income figure; the source survey suppresses small places.

Details are on the County List with Demographics page ($199).

Why did my FIPS codes lose their leading zeros?#

Excel reads a CSV as numbers when you double-click it, so 01017 becomes 1017. Every later join then fails without an error. In the county file, 318 of the 3,221 county codes start with a zero.

The fix is to import the file instead of opening it:

• Excel: Data → From Text/CSV, then set county_fips to Text.
• Google Sheets: File → Import, then turn off “Convert text to numbers, dates, and formulas.”

Step 1 of Build balanced sales territories from US counties in Excel or Google Sheets walks through it. If you set column widths: county_fips is 5 characters, and fips_place_code is 7 characters for cities and 10 for townships. To check the result, or to repair a file you already opened, see How to open a US City List CSV in Excel or Google Sheets without losing the leading zeros.

Can I do this at ZIP level?#

Two answers, one for each half of the question.

• Routing: yes. A ZIP code on an order or a lead can be matched to its county, and so to county demand. The guide is How to add county and FIPS codes to a list of ZIP codes in Excel or Google Sheets.
• ZIP-level demographics: no, and no such product exists. The ZIP Code List with Coordinates ($29) carries location columns and no demand columns. County files carry zip_count, and the paid city files carry zip_codes as a list. Both are lookup aids, not a ZIP-level demand table.

How current is it?#

Each column carries the date of its own source, so there is no single as-of date for a row. The methodology.md inside your download lists them under “About dates and vintages.” One example: population is the latest annual estimate (2024).

What is the completeness grade?#

completeness_grade is a letter from A to F that measures how many of a row’s values are present, not how accurate they are. In the county file, 3,136 of 3,221 rows grade A, and the only rows missing households are Puerto Rico’s 78 municipios. In the city file, 41.6% of places have no median household income (20,192 of 48,490). Filter on the column before you average across cities.

Can my whole team use one file?#

Yes. One purchase covers your organisation — you buy it once per company, not once per person. The full grant is in our Terms of Use.

Can I see the real data before I buy?#

Yes. Every paid file has a free 100-row sample with every column and real values. For territory work, take the 100-row County List with Demographics sample, or see it on the County List with Demographics page.

The free Basic Lists hold names and codes only, so they cannot show what the paid columns contain. The sample can.

See Build balanced sales territories from US counties in Excel or Google Sheets for the full walk-through.