Understanding Sales Territories and Industry Groupings
Before you can align the sales force, you must enter the information that the system needs in order to automatically assign sales team members to accounts. First you must set up sales territories.
You enter territories to separate the sales force into geographic regions. When you set up territories, you assign country, state, city, and/or postal code information to each territory.
You cannot assign the same country, state, city, or postal code to multiple territories. Therefore, you enter the most specific information for each territory, for example, City, leaving the less specific fields blank.
For example, your territories for California might include:
Los Angeles
San Francisco and Oakland
All Other California
Using this example, you would set up three territories for California, entering geographic information as follows:
Los Angeles
Enter "Los Angeles" in the City field. Leave the State field blank.
San Francisco and Oakland
Enter "San Francisco" and "Oakland" in the City field. Lseave the State field blank.
All Other California
Enter CA in the State field.
When the system determines which territory a California-based customer belongs to, it will first use the customer's postal code, and search through territories that have specific postal codes listed. If there is no match, which there would not be in this example, the system then searches for a territory based on the customer's city. If the customer's city is Los Angeles, the customer would be assigned to the Los Angeles territory. However, if the customer's city was, for example, Sacramento, the system would not find a match for city, and would then continue searching, using the customer's state. The system would then assign the Sacramento customer to the All Other California territory.
To add additional countries to the system, you add new codes in UDC 00/CN. To enter additional states into the system, you add new codes to UDC 00/S. To add new cities or postal codes to the system, you use the Postal Code Transaction program (P01117). You must enter this information into the system before you can assign it to a territory.
You can set up parent and child territories. For example, you might have a large sales force that covers Europe. This sales force might be split into smaller sub-territories. Therefore, you might set up the parent territory as Europe, and create child territories such as:
Germany
France
Spain
Italy
When you enter customer records, the system uses the address information that you enter for each territory, along with the address you enter for the customer, to determine which territory the customer belongs to.
After you set up territories, you set up industry codes and industry groupings. First, you must verify that all industry codes in which your customers do business are in UDC 01/SC. Then, you create industry groupings. After you create industry groupings, you associate industry codes from UDC 01/SC to each grouping. You cannot add an industry code to more than one industry grouping.
This information is used to determine what industry grouping a customer is associated with, which is then used to determine which sales team members are assigned to the account. Additionally, you can set up parent and child industry groupings. An organization's sales force might be very specialized by product or service area. Therefore, the organization might choose to create specialized industry groupings.
For example, an organization specializing in selling widgets and gadgets to the automotive and medical industries might create these parent industry groupings:
Automotive
Medical
The organization can then create child industry groupings. Examples of child industry groupings that might be created under the Automotive parent industry grouping include:
Automotive Widgets
Automotive Gadgets
After you set up territories, industry codes, and industry groupings, you can then associated sales team members with each territory and industry grouping. The system uses this information to automatically assign sales team members to accounts based on their industry groupings, geographic proximity to the address that is associated with the account, and effective dates.
Additionally, you can click the Expand All and Collapse All options on the Search for Territories and the Search for Industry Groupings forms to review the hierarchical structure of territories and industry groupings.