Overview

This section uses very simple examples to illustrate how you set up sales territories to provide salespeople access to accounts and opportunities and how you enable them to forecast.

The examples use the two most frequently used dimensions: address and product. Here's what they cover:

• Automatically assigning access to individual salespeople by product or address.

• Automatically assigning access only to managers when salespeople manage and sell to their own accounts.

• Handling territories that don't roll up neatly by address or by product and to separate assignment and forecasting.

• Automatically assigning product specialists and others to help with a particular opportunity line using special territories, called overlay territories.

• How to set up catchall territories so executives don't have to troubleshoot territories.

• Ignoring or hiding the owner fields in the account and opportunity UIs and relying exclusively on sales territories and assignment rules to determine access.

As a rule, if you can draw the boundaries of sales territories along some dimension, then you should use sales territories to automatically assign access to accounts and opportunities to individual salespeople. Assigning salespeople using territories makes it easy for you to change the assignment when salespeople leave or are hired and to perform sales territory realignment. When you're realigning territories to balance the workload and to reward your top performers, you can experiment with different what-if sales territory scenarios in territory proposals. If you're dividing your territories by address and by product, then you can draw the territory boundaries for individual salespeople by either dimension.