Why organizing your sales by geography is wrong

Once a lead is qualified it gets distributed to the salesmen. As all salesmen are not equal, the lead management should match the best salesman with this particular lead.
However typically a lead gets passed on to a salesman based on the geography as most sales teams have been organized by geography.

In this way a salesman will get all kinds of leads: the large and the small, the business focused and technical, the special cases and the standard demands.

A salesman is good in persuasion, convincing and selling. However he will not be able to sell all products or services of a company equally. Certain salesmen will be better in large deals having a long sales cycle, whereas others prefer fast closing deals. Some salesmen are more technical educated than other who are solely focusing on business matters with tangible and intangible benefits.

There are salesmen who can handle difficult deals or difficult customers or complex sales better, but who are not interested in making price quotations for yet another standard product with a predefined discount.

Hence lead management and distribution should not be based upon geography but related to the nature, capacities, maturity, past successes and interests of each salesman.

Do you distribute your leads based on geography?