How to choose which city to sell in next

The talk about the next city often starts with size: Pune is huge, Hyderabad is growing, and the distributor says Chennai is ready. Rank the candidates another way. Start with the enquiries and orders you already get from each city. Then ask how quickly you can reply and serve there. Look at size last. A big city tells you the ceiling. Your own records tell you whether buyers there already want you, and a reply test tells you whether you can keep them.

Why size is the wrong first question

Every large city is large for your competitors too. The biggest metros have the most suppliers already in place, the highest costs for an office and a salesperson, and buyers who have heard every pitch. Size is real, but it is the last tie-breaker, not the first filter.

The cities that work early are the ones where buyers are already reaching you without being asked. A plant engineer in Jamshedpur who rings a Kolkata maker, waits two days for a quote and still orders is telling you something no market report can.

The column nobody fills in

Your invoices, marketplace leads and call logs already show where enquiries and orders come from. Our note on reading your enquiry data by city shows how to pull them into one sheet and clean the city names.

For choosing a city, add one column that sheet does not have. Ask your sales team, city by city: which enquiries did we lose because we were too far, too slow, or had nobody to send? Nobody writes those down unless asked. They are the clearest sign of buyers who want you and are not being served.

Test the reply before you score it

The reply column is the one owners fill in with hope. So test it. Ask a customer or a friend in each finalist city to send an enquiry by your usual route, at an ordinary hour. Note when the first reply came, whether it carried a price and a delivery date, and whether it was in a language they were comfortable with. Then ask whoever would serve that city how they would get a technician there next week. Score what happened, not what should have.

The city ranking sheet

Score each candidate city on the same columns. The figures below are illustrative, for one business.

The rule for reading it: pick the city with the strongest evidence in the first three columns. Then check the next three can be met without heroics. Size breaks ties. A city with many enquiries and a poor tested reply is a reason to fix your reply route, not to move.

The size column deserves real work for the two or three finalists, because "large" is a guess. Count the actual buyers there, the factories, clinics, hotels or dealers in your category. Our locations pages are a place to start reading about a finalist.

Imagine a fan maker in Kolkata

Imagine a Kolkata maker of industrial exhaust fans and air washers, sold to factories, warehouses and foundries. The numbers in the sheet above are this example's, and they are illustrative.

The owner chose Delhi NCR first, because it held more factories than anyone could count. An agent was appointed there. Enquiries came, but every quote went back to Kolkata and took two days. When a warehouse asked who would install the fans and attend a breakdown, the agent had no answer. A year on, Delhi had produced one order.

Then the sales manager built the sheet from the invoices, the marketplace leads and the sales team's memory of lost enquiries. Jamshedpur had been sending enquiries all along, from engineering units and steel plant vendors, and eight had ordered despite the distance. It was an overnight road trip. Two of the team spoke Hindi. The company moved its effort there, with quotes sent the same day and a technician on a fixed visiting day. Delhi stayed with the agent, with no new spend, to be scored again on the same columns next year. Jamshedpur was not free either: the visiting day cost the company a technician's Thursdays, and one Jamshedpur order was lost the first month because the technician was on the road.

When to ignore the ranking

Follow the ranking unless one of three things is true. A large customer is asking you to follow them into a city, and their orders alone cover the cost. You sell entirely through a national marketplace or a single distributor, so the city choice is theirs, not yours. Or you are new and have no enquiry history worth the name. Then run a small written test in one or two cities first; our note on how much to spend testing a new city sets the ceiling and the count.

And if the reply column is weak everywhere, fix that before choosing any city. An enquiry answered the next day in a new city is a wasted enquiry.

Fill the evidence columns first

Use one year of invoices and leads, and fill the first three columns for every city that appears more than a few times. Ask the sales team for the lost-for-distance count while the year is fresh in their minds. Once a city wins, entering it is its own job, covered in our guide on how to enter a new city. To have the sheet built and the finalists sized properly, tell us what you need; market sizing and opportunity assessment, enquiry response starter and new market entry strategy are the related services.