Design and Manage Territories
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how Territory Planning helps optimize sales coverage and align teams with leadership goals.
- Identify the benefits of keeping sales reps focused on their areas of responsibility.
- Show how regularly optimizing territory models ensures the best sales team coverage.
Uncharted Territories
Traditionally, planning sales territories relies on hierarchy tree models. While that’s a great place to start, using visual components to complement your planning efforts helps you maximize the sales potential of your territory model. Salesforce offers a dynamic territory planning solution that helps you design your territories to maximize sales, ensure optimal sales team coverage, and readily adapt to changes in staffing, leadership, and market conditions.
Design Territory Models
With Territory Planning, included when you purchase Sales Planning you can design territories for your sales and service teams on an interactive map. This visual approach delivers key benefits.
Design your territory model using a hierarchy that represents your company’s sales structure. For a top-down approach, focus on broader territory structures before defining more detailed territory levels. Or apply a bottom-up approach and plan for territories at a more granular or local level.
Distribute sales opportunities and service requests fairly. Balance work assignments among your reps. Take advantage of scenarios that identify optimal territory coverage and address staffing changes, updated performance goals, and geographical considerations.
Optimize territories based on your business priorities. Design territories that include a mix of contiguous and noncontiguous areas, which provides opportunities for all sales and service reps to engage with customers in person and remotely. Adjust territories to ensure sales and service records are accessible and logically arranged geographically.
When you optimize territories for in-person and remote business, Territory Planning delivers a mix of contiguous and noncontiguous territories.
After you design high-performance territories, you publish them to Sales Territories, where you prepare to activate your model.
Manage Your Territories
After you publish your territories to Sales Territories, you can review your model before you activate it. Sales leadership communicates territory configurations with stakeholders and field reps by creating and sharing reports and dashboards that visualize territory success. Here’s how.
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Run assignment rules. Apply assignments to records based on the rules and criteria you define in Territory Planning.
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Review assignments. Ensure accuracy and fine-tune assignments for your accounts, leads, opportunities, and users to align with your preferences. These assignments populate owner fields in Salesforce records.
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Activate your territory model. Implement assignments across your territory hierarchy, which gives managers access to their team’s information and keeps reps focused on only their assigned records.
After you activate your territory model, you can quickly respond to changes in your company’s leadership, product offerings, and market conditions when you optimize your model regularly. Let’s see how.
Optimize Your Territory Models Regularly
Companies traditionally restructure sales territories only a few times a year. But suppose you need to address substantial changes in revenue, adjustments in product lines, or personnel changes. Waiting for months to revisit your territory model can result in lost sales.
By using Territory Planning and Sales Territories together, you can update assignments, shift tasks based on skills and experience, and adjust territories whenever needed. That way, you ensure optimal coverage for your company’s accounts, leads, and opportunities. Let’s take a look at the process.
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Import model data from Sales Territories into Territory Planning. Work with your established territory model and refine it based on your changing needs.
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Optimize territory models in Territory Planning. Incorporate changes that impact your sales teams in your updated model.
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Publish the optimized model back to Sales Territories. Run assignment rules, review your revised assignments, and make any necessary adjustments before activating the optimized territory model.
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Activate your territory model. Implement the changes from your updated territory model.
Regularly review and adjust your model to ensure your sales territories align with business objectives and stay adaptable to market changes. By keeping your territories on track and responsive, your sales coverage can evolve with your company.