Your field sales map is drawn around GDP and the money sits in 20 cities

When a sales leader carves up the world for next year, the spreadsheet usually starts with GDP by country, adds a population column, then divides quota by heads. I opened Blair Fix's new essay on what he calls the business-to-industry index expecting a history of empires with nothing to say about a territory plan. I finished it convinced that most of those spreadsheets send reps to the wrong postcodes.

Fix's measure is simple. Take a place's share of world income and divide it by its share of world energy use. Above one, the place collects more money than its physical activity would justify, and he calls it business dominated. Below one, it burns the energy and does the work without collecting the income. His 2023 ranking is led by Washington DC, then Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Malta, followed by the American coastal states and Western Europe, with Panama and Israel in the mix. Less than a quarter of the world's population lives in business-dominated places, and under 1% lives where the index tops four. More than three quarters live where industry dominates.

Fix writes as a political economist with little affection for the financiers he is mapping. I read him as an operator, and his map looks to me like a list of where purchase orders get approved. Energy use follows the places where your product gets used, while income share follows whoever controls the budget that pays for it.

The corporate data backs him. On the 2026 Fortune Global 500, which needs $33.2 billion of revenue to get in, Beijing hosts 42 companies, Tokyo 26, New York 15, London 13 and Paris 12. Beijing had led that city ranking for 13 straight years by 2025. McKinsey counted only 850 cities that house large-company headquarters, and found that 20 of them host a third of all large companies and more than 40 percent of their combined revenue.

Now lay that against how buying works. Gartner says B2B buyers spend 17% of their purchase time with potential suppliers, and when they compare vendors any single rep might get 5% to 6%. 6sense puts the share of evaluation done before a vendor is contacted at 61%. The rep's slice of the decision is thin to begin with. A rep based in an industrial region, however large its GDP, spends that thin slice with people who pass a recommendation upward to a committee in one of those 20 cities. I think a lot of field headcount justified by country GDP pays for goodwill with users who never own the contract.

McKinsey's own work gives the best case against me. Subsidiaries do not sit where headquarters do: Singapore and São Paulo rank second and sixth for subsidiaries while sitting 20th and 35th for headquarters. McKinsey also forecast that more than 60 percent of global growth to 2025 would come from 600 cities, including 577 middleweights under 10 million people, and that middleweights in emerging regions alone would supply about 40 percent of it. If growth is spread out, the argument goes, spread the reps.

I take the subsidiary point seriously, and I would staff Singapore and São Paulo before a dozen national capitals. By Fix's logic both are hubs anyway, because regional offices run budgets for whole regions. The growth point I buy less. McKinsey was forecasting where output and consumption would rise, which is industry in Fix's sense. The income that funds a software licence or a data contract flows to whoever holds the property rights, and 2025 has come and gone with the same handful of cities on top of the Fortune list. In my experience growth in a middleweight city shows up as more shifts and more seats using your product, while the invoice goes to the parent.

Fix's own caveat helps here. He admits DC tops his list partly because its border wraps a city with no hinterland, and he says he cannot get energy data for Lower Manhattan or Shanghai, so he is stuck with countries and states. Your CRM has no such problem, because it records the city on every signed contract.

So run the test. Pull every closed-won deal above your enterprise threshold for the past two years and tag it by the city of the person who signed. Then map where your quota-carrying reps actually sit. If your top 20 signing cities bring in more than 40 percent of revenue and hold less than 40 percent of your field headcount, move the difference before your next territory plan locks.

Prompted by The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism – Economics from the Top Down, Economics from the Top Down.