Territory Management

Dividing up sales territories effectively can be the difference between a happy and harmonious commercial operation that exceeds the needs of its customers and a situation where commercial teams are competing with each other at the expense of those customers. Modeling and managing sales territories can be complex and labor-intensive if all changes have to be made manually.

By the end of this chapter, you will understand why organizations divide their areas of commercial business into sales territories, and why they actively manage these. You will look at the information you need to gather to understand how your organization manages territories. You will then learn what Sales Cloud Enterprise Territory Management is, its capabilities, and when to use it. You will look at how to translate your business needs into a design, and finally, you will learn the steps to enable and set up Enterprise Territory Management. This will allow you to determine whether you should...

Supporting tools and information

For this chapter, you will need access to a sandbox to set up, assess, and test your proposed Enterprise Territory Management configuration.

Please note that Territory Management is not available in Professional Edition.

What are sales territories?

Let’s start with some of the fundamentals. A sales territory is an area or a grouping of existing and potential customers, that an individual or team is responsible for targeting. Sales territory management is the process of defining or mapping, and then managing those territories. Sales territory mapping is the process of deciding how the territories are defined, who is allocated to them, and the sales and revenue they are expected to deliver. Management is the ongoing monitoring, allocation, and adjusting of territories to ensure they support business objectives.

A very common way of defining territories is by geographical areas. This takes into account language, cultural differences, and physical proximity, ensuring that someone with the appropriate knowledge can serve the relevant customers. It doesn’t necessarily evenly balance customer needs and possible revenue in each territory. For example, small businesses have different requirements...

Understanding your organization’s territory strategy

You can pick up a basic understanding of how your organization approaches sales territories by understanding how the sales team is divided up and their geographical locations. For example, if there are salespeople who focus on specific product lines or businesses depending on their sizes, these could also be used as types of territory in addition to the geographical ones.

How organizations divide up sales territories is a strategic question and varies in complexity depending on the scale of the organization. The territory strategy is defined at a senior level of the organization by the Head of Sales, Sales Director, or Chief Revenue Office. It supports the organization’s overall objectives and will be based on a combination of insight from data and the sales leader’s judgment.

To gather detailed requirements, you would ideally speak to or gather information from the person who defines the strategy and the...

What is Sales Cloud Enterprise Territory Management?

Enterprise Territory Management (ETM) in Salesforce Sales Cloud, also referred to as Territory Management, is the capability designed to allocate Accounts to sales territories and individuals based on various criteria. The functionality allows you to specify types of territories, define your territories and their hierarchy in a model, and then automatically assign Accounts to territories based on rules. It provides the flexibility to assign Accounts to multiple territories and increases the flexibility in reporting with additional ways to filter data in both reports and Collaborative Forecasting.

As already mentioned in the What are sales territories? section, this capability is not explicitly designed to enable territory mapping. Salesforce does have a product to map territories, called Salesforce Maps or Territory Planning. We will not be looking at these in this book as it is not available in the Salesforce Enterprise edition...

When to use Sales Cloud Territory Management

As part of your implementation, you need to decide whether you are going to use the Enterprise Territory Management functionality. It is important to note that just because your organization has sales territories it doesn’t automatically mean that you should implement Sales Cloud Enterprise Territory Management. You will still want to carry out an assessment of whether to use it. ETM provides much-needed functionality for organizations whose territories are complex or change regularly. However, if an organization’s requirements can be met by using the standard role hierarchy and reporting, you should just use that as enabling Territory Management will increase the complexity and maintenance required.

There are some key questions that will help you decide:

• Are you going to forecast in Sales Cloud?
• If yes, are you using Collaborative Forecasting and does it meet your needs by using the Role Hierarchy, or do people...

Translating Territory requirements into a design

Before you can build your Territory Model, you need to define your types and hierarchy. Your hierarchy will typically have a geographical component and your types will likely represent the other dimension in your forecasting matrix, such as the industry vertical or customer size. You should aim to draw out your hierarchy before you start to build.

You also need to decide how you structure your assignment rules. You are likely to have geographically based criteria, perhaps by country, or for countries as large as the US, it might be by state or zip code. For this, you need to make sure that the data you are using is standardized and complete. If you have not done so already you should consider implementing the State and Country/Territory Picklists functionality. This will ensure you have a consistent set of data to use in the criteria. In addition to the geographical criteria, you will also have criteria that specify the other dimensions...

Setting up Enterprise Territory Management

Before setting up ETM you should be aware that the following is required:

• Customizable forecasting must be turned on
• Users need Manage Territories and View Setup and Configuration to view the active territory and the Accounts assigned to it

The main steps for setting up ETM are as follows:

1. Enable Territory Management: First, ensure that Territory Management is enabled in your Salesforce setup. This can be done from the Setup menu.
2. Define Default Access Levels: Select the Access Levels that Territory Users have to Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases.
3. Define Territory Types: Establish different types of territories based on your business needs, such as geographical areas, customer size, or product lines.
4. Create Territory Model (hierarchy): Build a hierarchical structure of territories. This involves setting up parent and child territories, reflecting how your organization’s sales territories are structured...

Summary

Salesforce Sales Cloud Territory Management is a powerful tool designed to optimize the allocation of Accounts to sales territories, ensuring efficient resource distribution and enhanced sales performance. By organizing sales efforts according to specific territories and assigning them to the appropriate teams or individuals, companies can improve their sales strategies and customer relationships. Territory Management provides the tools that simplify the maintenance of territories for organizations that have complex requirements.

In this chapter, we learned how to identify your organization’s territory requirements, the capability of Sales Cloud Enterprise Territory Management, and when to use it. We went on to look at how you can translate your organization’s requirements into a design and then stepped through how you can set up this functionality.

In the next chapter, we will explore how you can model processes other than the Sales and lead generation...

Further reading

• How Do Permissions for Territories Affect Feature and Data Access?

  https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.tm2_how_access_permissions_work.htm&type=5

• Enterprise Territory Management Allocations

  https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.tm2_allocations.htm&type=5

• Territory Design and Management

  https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.tm2_territory_design_and_management.htm&type=5

• Trailhead: Sales Territories and Forecasting

  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/sales-territories-and-forecasting

• Trailhead: Advanced Territory Management

  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/advanced-territory-management

• How do permissions for Territories affect feature and data access?

  https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.tm2_how_access_permissions_work.htm&type=5

• OpportunityTerritory2AssignmentFilter Global Interface

  https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.248.0.apexref.meta...