Matrix Sales Organization

This chapter covers the methods that you can use to provide visibility into the business pipeline for managers in a matrix sales organization. It includes the following topics:

About the Matrix Sales Organization

A sales team can consist of individuals from many organizations, groups, and divisions. The team typically includes an account manager or field sales professional, a telesales professional, a sales consultant, a product specialist, and an industry specialist. In such a matrix sales organization, these individuals can report to different managers, each of whom wants to see the business pipeline.

By default, a manager has visibility, through the My Team’s views, into every opportunity, account, and contact a subordinate can access. For example, with the My Team’s Opportunities view, a manager can see every opportunity on which one of their subordinates is primary.

Therefore, the primary sales representative’s manager has visibility into the subordinates’ opportunities through the My Team’s view. The other managers (overlay managers such as the telesales professional’s manager or the product specialist’s manager) need another way to see these opportunities and revenues.

In this instance, you can use one of the following methods to provide visibility:

Change the visibility of the My Team’s Opportunities view
Use the My Team’s Revenues view
Use the All and All Across Organizations views
Add overlay managers to the sales team

About Changing the Visibility of My Team’s Opportunities View

You can change the visibility of the My Team’s Opportunities view using Siebel Tools so that it shows every opportunity in which a subordinate is listed in the sales team (instead of the opportunities where a subordinate is primary).

This approach allows overlay sales managers to see what is going on in the opportunity pipeline, at the expense of system performance and synchronization times. You avoid the additional administration involved in adding overlay sales managers to the sales team, but managers can experience slower connected response times using this view and slower synchronization times in the Siebel Mobile Web Client.

For information on changing visibility, see the Manager List Mode user property information in the Siebel Developer's Reference.

About Using the My Team’s Revenues View (End User)

The My Team’s Revenues view allows a manager to see the revenue items for which a subordinate is listed as the sales representative. A revenue item is a portion of an opportunity. Using the Opportunities screen’s Revenues view, the members of the sales team can allocate specific portions of the overall opportunity to individual sales team members. This allows each of their managers to see their portion of the overall opportunity by using the My Team’s Revenues view.

The primary sales representative is already listed as the owner of the overall opportunity. The telesales representative can also take credit for some portion of the opportunity, while each product specialist takes credit for their product-related revenues. Their respective managers see, in the My Team’s Revenues view, each of their subordinate’s level of involvement in that opportunity. For more information about using the My Team’s Revenues view, see Reviewing Revenues (End User).

About Using the All and All Across Organization Views (End User)

This approach allows sales managers, directors, and executives to find the opportunities or revenues that they are looking for by using a predefined query on the All or All Across Organizations views. The query includes some unique criteria that designate the type of opportunity or revenue the overlay sales manager can use to find the appropriate set of records.

For example, a product manager for a given product line uses a product-specific query on the All Revenues or All Revenues Across Organizations view to find each revenue related to their product line. A country manager for Germany runs a query on the All Opportunities view for every opportunity with the country code for Germany.

For more information about the All and All Across Organization views and forecast visibility, see Creating a Forecast Series.

About Adding Overlay Managers to the Sales Team (End User)

This option guarantees that overlay sales managers can see their subordinates’ opportunities, but it also means that a large number of people can end up on the sales team, a large number of opportunities can be synchronized, and that you may have to do a lot of territory administration work when reporting relationship changes

Mobile sales organizations sometimes want to consider the impact on synchronization times. You can end up providing the overlay sales managers with more information than they really want on a mobile client.