How to Assign Outside Help Using Overlay Territories

Sometimes you want to assign others in your organization to assist with a sale. For example, if an opportunity line includes complex equipment, product specialists may be required to help with the technical details. You can make such assignments using overlay territories.

Sales Territory Setup

This diagram shows a simple overlay organization in a sales territory structure. The overlay organization consists of a manager and two product specialists. Each specialist is automatically assigned to help with the sale of a specific server model. The overlay organization territories are the children of the US Product Sales catchall territory for convenience.

The table lists the key entries for each overlay territory. Note the following:

• The Territory Type is always set to Overlay.

• For the Sales Support Overlay territory, the values of both dimensions are blank. This ensures the territory is not assigned to any account or opportunity.

• The Enable Forecasting column for the overlay territories can be set to Disabled or Overlay Only.

  • Use Disabled if you're not forecasting overlay territories.

  • Use Overlay Only if your overlay organization creates its own forecasts for the sales where they're involved. Such overlay forecasts are not counted as part of the sales organization forecasts to prevent double counting. If you do enable overlay forecasting, then you must set the value for manager territories that approve or adjust forecasts for both prime and overlay territories, such as US Product Sales, to Prime and Overlay. Enabling forecasts by overlay territories also requires additional setup so salespeople can specify overlay credit on the opportunity UI itself. See the Implementation Reference guide for details.

Territory Name	Territory Type	Address	Product	Enable Forecasting
US Product Sales	Prime	Any	Any	Prime or Prime and Overlay
Sales Support Overlay	Overlay	Blank	Blank	Disabled or Overlay Only
Sentinel Server Overlay	Overlay	Any	Sentinel Servers	Disabled or Overlay Only
Green Server Overlay	Overlay	Any	Green Servers	Disabled or Overlay only

Child territories automatically inherit the coverage of their parent when you create them, so, for the Sales Support Overlay territory, you must delete the inherited coverage as described in Creating a Territory with No Coverage topic.

How Assignment Works for This Scenario

The application assigns both the prime and overlay territories at the same time. Here is the detail for the assignment of overlay territories:

• The application assigns both the Sentinel Server Overlay and Green Server Overlay territories to all accounts because the Address dimension is set to Any. This provides the overlay team access to account notes, activities, and other details they need if they engage with the account.

• The application assigns the Sentinel Server Overlay and Green Server Overlay territories only to opportunities with server products in those two product groups.