# Marcus Telles, Director of Sales Operations at Bravada — read of Territory Optimizer AI, 2026-05-11

> 11 years in sales ops, currently running territory design for 73 reps across 6 regions. My QBR two weeks ago had two AEs argue for 20 minutes about who owned a $400K account. I left that meeting and typed "territory overlap tool salesforce alternative" into Google.

## How I got here

Third result on that search, below a Salesforce help article and a HubSpot blog post. Clicked through because the meta description said something about "hours not weeks" and I was curious. I have SFDC Territory Management turned on and it is genuinely one of the worst UX experiences I've ever had to explain to a VP. I was hopeful. I'm always hopeful.

## What I clicked first

The line "Territory assignments are either a revenue lever or a revenue drain" stopped me in a good way. That's the real framing. I've said almost exactly that sentence in a slide deck. Then I read "Get them balanced in hours, not weeks" and I thought, okay, maybe. The hero cleared the bar of not insulting my intelligence, which is higher than you'd think given the tools in this space.

## Where I paused

The pricing table. $299/month for 25 reps, $749 for 100. Those are real numbers. That's a real-looking SaaS pricing page. I was mid-scroll deciding whether to click "Start Free Trial" when I hit this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet." I had to read that twice. *Idea.* I scrolled back up to figure out what I had actually been looking at.

## What I distrusted

The whole architecture of the page. It's dressed up as a product you can buy and use, with feature tiles and a pricing table and a "Start Free Trial" button, and then it turns out to be a pitch to sell me a $5 PDF and a $99 code starter kit so I can go build it myself. The Year-1 take-home number displayed prominently is "-$29,618" and the odds are "1 in 8." That information is useful if I'm evaluating whether to start a company. I came here to solve a territory problem, not to found one.

"We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The product being sold here is not territory software. It's an idea license. Which is fine, but calling it "Territory Optimizer" and showing me a feature list for a thing that doesn't exist is disorienting.

Also: "Stop managing spreadsheets. Start managing intelligently." That exact sentence has appeared on approximately 400 SaaS landing pages since 2019.

## What would convince me

If this were a real product: a screen recording of an actual territory reassignment being run. Not a 30-second explainer, a 4-minute walkthrough where someone imports a real account list with messy data and I see what happens at the edges. Does it handle accounts that straddle zip code boundaries? Does it account for rep ramp time? Does it connect to Salesforce or is it a standalone thing I have to export/import from?

If this is an idea kit: I want to see one person who bought the $99 kit and shipped something, with a Stripe dashboard screenshot and a sentence about what they'd do differently. The Fermi math is interesting but Fermi math on a pitch page is doing less work than one real data point.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. When you say "AI-powered territory assignments that balance workload, account potential, and rep capacity" -- what does the AI actually do? Is it optimization against a weighted scoring model, or something else? What inputs does it require and what does it output?
2. Is there a live demo I can actually click through, or is this still pre-build?
3. The $5 dossier unlocks "first 7 build tasks." I'm not building this. Are you saying there's no version of this I can just buy and use today?

## Verdict: dismissive

Not because the problem is wrong -- the problem is real and I'm actively in pain with it. Because I landed on a page that looked like a product and turned out to be a pitch for me to become a founder. Those are two completely different conversations and the page doesn't pick one.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-11. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*