Salespeople in Each Region Manage Their Own Accounts and Sell All Products to Those Accounts

If individual salespeople in each region manage their own customer relationships and sell all products to those customers, then there may be no way of drawing sales territories to assign new accounts to them directly.

Instead, you can automatically assign access to the managers in each region and have the managers distribute the accounts to the salespeople working for them. Even though you are not assigning records to individual salespeople, you must still set up territories for them so they can forecast.

Territory Setup

Because everyone sells all products, you can set up sales territories by address only for the managers. For salespeople, you create territories with no coverage for the address dimension so the territories get skipped over by assignment but can be used for forecasting. A territory with no coverage is blank, has no entry, for any dimension.

Here's a diagram that shows the territory hierarchy using only the address dimension. You must list all the appropriate states in the West and East territories. An entry of Blank means the territory has no address coverage (no accounts are assigned automatically). Because all salespeople sell all products, the product dimension is not required unless you are using products in overlay territories or other portions of your territory setup.

Sample territory hierarchy with the US Product Sales territory at the top. The West and East territories are the child territories under US Product Sales. The West territory is the parent of the West 1 and West 2 territories. The East territory is the parent of the East 1 and East 2 territories. Each territory includes the values for the address dimension which are listed in the table which follows.

Here are the key entries for each territory. Territory Type is always set to Prime because all territories are used for sales revenue forecasting. The Enable Forecasting field is always set to Prime only, enabling the territory owner to participate in sales revenue forecasting.

Territory Name	Territory Type	Address	Enable Forecasting
US Product Sales	Prime	Any	Prime only
East	Prime	Country: United States, State: NY Country: United States, State: NJ Country: United States, State: MA And entries for all the remaining 22 states in the eastern half of the US	Prime only
East 1	Prime	Blank	Prime only
East 2	Prime	Blank	Prime only
West	Prime	Country: United States, State: CA Country: United States, State: NV Country: United States, State: AZ And entries for all the remaining 22 states in the western half of the US	Prime only
West 1	Prime	Blank	Prime only
West 2	Prime	Blank	Prime only

Child territories automatically inherit the coverage of their parent when you create them, so you must delete the inherited coverage to make them blank. For details on how to delete the coverage for a territory, see the Creating a Territory with No Coverage topic.

How Assignment Works for This Scenario

When a lead comes in for a potential customer with an address in California who is interested in purchasing laptops, the inside sales team converts the qualified lead into an account and opportunity. Here's the assignment process:

The application automatically assigns the new account to the West territory using the address dimension.
The manager who owns the West territory (or a sales administrator working on the manager's behalf), edits the salesperson's territory and includes the account by name.
Running territory assignment automatically assigns the opportunity lines for that account to the same salesperson as well.

If an account is missing the state information or the account is in a country other than the US, then the account is assigned to the catchall territory, US Product Sales.

Note: Because the accounts are assigned by name to the territories, administrators must manually move the accounts during territory realignment.