Sales Territories and Assignment

Getting assigned to a sales territory provides salespeople with access to accounts and opportunities. Sales territories also provide the framework for forecasting. Salespeople can forecast only opportunity lines in their territories and forecasts roll up the territory hierarchy.

How You Gain Access to Sales Data

All salespeople can view basic account information, including customer names, contacts, and addresses. You must have additional access to view the opportunities on the account, and to share all the details you need to collaborate during the sales process. Information that requires additional access includes customer interactions, to-do lists, and appointments. Without the additional access, you can't share collateral, and collaborate on presentations. If you implement Microsoft 365 or Mobile, then only the accounts that are part of a salesperson's territory are downloaded and synchronized. Here's how you get access to additional sales information:

• You're the owner of the record.

  Each record must have an owner. You automatically become the owner of any record you create. The owner, who is automatically a member of the team on the record, has full privileges, including the ability to edit the record and add others to the team. The record owner or the sales administrator can reassign ownership of individual records. The sales administrator can also reassign ownership of multiple records at the same time using the Mass Transfer feature available in the Navigator. Users converting a lead to an opportunity, can also assign the owners of the resulting accounts and opportunities.

• You're a member of the team on the record.

  The owner can add members manually and assign different levels of access to them: view only, edit, or full (the ability to add others). For opportunity and lead teams, you can also assign team members automatically using assignment rules.

• You're the owner or a member of a sales territory assigned to the record or owner or member of the parent territories in the sales territory hierarchy.

  Being the owner of a territory makes gives you additional privileges over a member: owners can review and submit forecasts up the sales territory hierarchy.

  Note: While the territory name is always listed in each record that's assigned to a territory, opportunities also copy over the names of the territory members to the opportunity team. Lead teams and account teams don't include the territory team members. If you want to make the opportunity team behavior consistent with leads and accounts, you can set the system profile option Territory Based Resource Assignment Style as described in the Opportunity Profile Options Default Values and Effects topic in the Implementation Reference guide.

• You're a manager in the resource hierarchy of the resource with access.

  Managers in a salesperson's resource management hierarchy have automatic visibility to their team's set of accounts, contacts, opportunities, leads, and other information. They don't have to be explicitly assigned to each territory or team. The resource hierarchy provides you access to sales data, but not to forecasts. Only territory owners can view forecasts. Most Oracle customers create a sales territory hierarchy that matches the resource hierarchy, so a manager is also the owner of the territory, but the two can be different.

• You're assigned to an access group.

  Access groups provide an alternate way of providing access to sales data based on conditions you define. For example, you can use access groups to grant specific users access to all open opportunities, or all accounts in the UK, and so on. Access groups aren't replacements for sales territories, but they provide a good way to grant access to people who assist with sales. For example, you may need to provide the legal department with access to certain opportunities.

• You're a sales administrator (a user with the Sales Administrator job role).

  Sales administrators have access to everything.

• The implementation team configures and assigns job roles with different privileges.

  You can change the default access levels, by copying and modifying the existing job roles. See the Create and Edit Job, Abstract, and Duty Roles chapter of the Securing CX Sales and Fusion Service guide for more details.

How You Grant Additional Access Automatically

You can provide salespeople access by manually reassigning record ownership or adding someone to the team on the record, or you can automate the process using one or both of the following methods:

• Assign access using sales territories.

  You can set up the sales territory boundaries based on a wide variety of factors, called dimensions. The most common dimensions include address, product, customer size, customer type, and industry. Many Oracle customers also define their own additional dimensions.

  When you assign salespeople using territories, the territories themselves become associated with the account, opportunity, or lead. If you later realign your sales territories or if there's a turnover in your sales organization, then the assignments reflect those changes automatically after you run the assignment process.

  The application assigns territories for each individual opportunity line separately. If an opportunity line gets assigned to your territory, you automatically gain access to the whole opportunity. If Lisa Jones' territory includes servers and Julian Henderson's laptops, both salespeople get access to an opportunity that includes servers and laptops.

• Assign opportunity and lead access to specific individuals by creating assignment rules.

  You can use rules to assign individual salespeople you specify to lead and opportunity teams if the rule conditions are met. Rules are the primary way of assigning salespeople to leads, and so rule setup is covered in the Leads chapter. For opportunities, you can create rules to assign additional salespeople using factors that aren't covered by sales territories, such as deal size or product knowledge. Creating rules to supplement territory assignment requires additional setup, including the setting of system profile options not covered in this guide. See the Implementation Reference guide for details.

Salespeople can trigger assignment manually or you can assign leads, accounts, and opportunities automatically by running assignment processes.

Sales Territory Boundaries

You define sales territory boundaries by the values you assign to their dimensions. For accounts, the territory dimensions provided by Oracle include:

• Address

  Define territories by address elements such as city, state, and postal code.

• Geography

  Legacy dimension that existing customers are using for geographical territories. While you can still use Geography to set up territories by states and other address elements, new Oracle customers should use the Address dimension instead. You can't use this dimension together with the Address dimension.

• Account type

  The account type specifies if the account is named or not.

• Customer size

• Industry

• Organization type

You can also create classification categories to define up to three additional dimensions.

Because opportunities are associated with an account, you can use the account dimensions to assign opportunities as well. Opportunities and leads have these additional dimensions:

• Business unit

• Product

  You can enter product groups or individual products from the sales catalog.

• Sales channel

  The available sales channels are: Direct, Indirect, and Partner.