How You Model Your Sales Organization

One of the most critical aspects of your implementation is the definition of the sales organization hierarchy and the assignment of your sales resources within this structure.

This structure represents how your sales force is organized internally and should be aligned with your sales strategy and how you sell in your marketplace. This structure drives data visibility for your sales users, rolls up the sales forecast, and aggregates data to measure performance at each level within your sales organization.

• A territory can represent the responsibility of a salesperson such as a set of customers

• A territory can represent the responsibility of a sales manager or executive such as a geographic region, line of business, product line, customer segment, or sales channel

• A territory can represent the responsibility of a channel account manager, including a specific set of partners and their respective sales activities

• A territory can represent a branch or a sales office responsible for selling to customers in a specific geographic region

• A territory can represent the jurisdiction of a channel partner such as authorizing the partner to sell a specific set of products to a set of customers

You organize territories in a hierarchy. While there is one single global territory structure for your entire enterprise, each branch of the overall structure represents a different part of the sales organization. The hierarchical relationship between territories at different levels defines how the data aggregation and visibility are rolled up.

Each territory is associated with one or more sales resources for that territory. Each resource on the territory team may have a designated function based on the role that team member has in the context of that territory. A resource may be assigned to multiple territories with the same or different roles.

Financial Company Example

Depending on your specific industry and business model, a territory can be used to model any part of your sales organization. These examples illustrate different scenarios:

In this example, the International Bank has six lines of business which are business units:Great WesternUK BankingBusiness BankingPersonal BankingWealth ManagementWholesale BankingThis figure highlights the Personal Banking business unit and territory coverage:The Brand dimension is Brand 2.The State dimension is New South Wales.The Region dimension is Region 2.The Branch dimension within Region 2 contains three branches.

The overall structure shows different lines of business. Within the Personal Banking line of business, territories are further broken down by brand, geography (state, and then region), and branch. Using this same example, the Wealth Management line of business is organized differently. The Wealth Management line of business defines territories by brand, customer segment, channel, and product.