About Positions

Positions represent job slots within an organization, typically a sales organization. Consider a sales organization that is defined by region. For example, Northeast Florida sales representative, South Florida sales representative, or Florida Panhandle sales representative. At different points in time, a different human may be handling that region. John Smith may be responsible for Northeast Florida today, but he might be moved to South Florida, promoted to sales manager, or even leave the company.

The customers and potential customers in his region do not change just because John moves to a different position or company. Someone else, perhaps Dave Jones, will take over those customers and opportunities and continue to manage that territory.

Note: Territory does not necessarily refer to a geographic region. It could also be broken down by other factors, such as deal size, or the types of products involved in an opportunity. In this sense, the term Territory is used generically to represent some logical division of target customers and opportunities as appropriate to the company.

For that reason, Siebel CRM does not associate sales data, such as customer accounts, contacts, sales leads, or opportunities, with specific users, but rather with the position that conceptually owns this data.

At a given point in time, a given user will hold a position, in this example, Northeast Florida Sales Representative and be able to see all the relevant data for that position. When John Smith moves on, he is disassociated with that position and the new user, Dave Jones, is associated to that position. This immediately moves all the data visibility from John to Dave.

The following are some guidelines for creating positions:

• For sales-centric organizations, there should usually be a one-to-one mapping between positions and users. You should create a position for each user before creating the actual users. There will be occasions where a user might have two positions. For example, John Smith is on vacation or the organization is looking for his replacement, so Dave Jones temporarily has his own position and John's, but as ideally the organization would like two sales representatives for this, two separate positions should be maintained in this type of example.

• For service-centric organizations, positions play a much smaller role, because a service user is typically not bounded by geography or other constraints. For example, if a user works in a call center, answering phone calls from customers, that user is not typically associated to a particular region or set of customers. Rather, they must assist any customer who calls in. As such, in a strictly service organization, it is common for service users to share a position.

It is possible to have a combination model within a single company–individual positions for sales users based on the way in which territories are assigned while service users share a position.

Note: In some sense, positions and organizations have similar purposes. However, it is just a difference in granularity. For example, if an organization is used to segregate data at the continent level (North America), a position is used within that organization to represent some subset, such as Northest Florida. As such, organization visibility typically includes data visible to a group of people, while position visibility includes data visible to an individual and his or her management.

Before continuing forward, create the required position records using the guidelines for determining whether individual positions are required for each user or whether positions can be shared. Positions are created by navigating to the following: Site Map > Administration - Group > Positions.