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Assignment Strategy for Sales Organizations

Sales organizations typically need to distribute opportunities and accounts to the proper people within the organization. Assignment of sales opportunities must take place quickly so that sales representatives can respond to potential revenue-generating opportunities. Information must also be readily available to salespeople to close the maximum number of sales possible.

Assignments in sales organizations are commonly made to positions responsible for a territory. Mobile salespeople who are not connected to a network can share information and work as a collaborative sales force on sales opportunities. Sales organizations can therefore use the talents of their salespeople within their entire organization.

Siebel Assignment Manager allows you to create territories for positions using a wide variety of criteria. By assigning objects to positions, you can have one sales representative inherit the opportunities, accounts, and contacts from another sales representative by reassigning the employee responsible for a specific position.

After you have created the territories using assignment criteria, a major territory realignment can negatively affect your system resources. If the realignment is large, Assignment Manager may create a volume of transactions for mobile clients, which increases synchronization time drastically. To avoid this, you can run a database extract server task (DbXtract) again and have the mobile clients initialize their databases. Because the time required to run a database extract server task for multiple clients may be significant, try to coordinate territory realignments with database extracts to occur during a time of low system utilization. For more information about database extracts, see Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide. For more information about running server tasks, see Siebel System Administration Guide.

Because sales organizations typically distribute their accounts and opportunities based on territories, create assignment rules based on these territories. Assignment Manager includes two additional views, Territory List view and Territory Detail view, originally designed for sales organizations. However, these views function exactly as the Assignment Rule view and Assignment Criteria view, respectively. The Territory List view has been simplified to allow users to define their sales territories. For this reason, some of the assignment options covered in this chapter do not appear in the Territory List view.

NOTE:  The Territory List and detail views may eventually be phased out from the assignment administration screens. If your configuration currently uses these views, note that they can migrate to the existing Assignment Rule views with no loss of functionality or data. For further information about these views, contact Siebel Technical Support.