I am an outside sales engineer for a manufacturer’s rep company who has recently purchased a single license of Salesforce. Our intent is to configure this single license to match our company’s needs, then roll out additional licenses to our outside sales team.
As a Manufacturer's Rep, we are the outside sales team for up to 18 different Manufacturing companies at the same time to customers in our territory. We have 8 outside sales reps to cover the territory, but we all effectively sell the same 18 Manufacturer's product sets, just to our own customers in our specific territories.
My main challenge is determining the proper way to address incorporating Manufacturing Account and Contacts records which are shared between multiple outside sales reps. The current problem is that each outside sales engineer has their own Outlook Contacts database which all merge into Salesforce, which create records for their individual customers OK, but create duplicates on our Manufacturer records.
I was thinking of having one additional Salesforce license dedicated to being a “Manufacturer” user, strictly for containing all of our Manufacturer contacts in one location that can be maintained by our inside sales office. We can easily add new principal contacts on our computers, and simply assign them to “Manufacturer” as owner, instead of “Outside Sales Rep”. Then each Outside Sales Rep would be free to simply maintain their own customer records, and the Salesforce database would not be populated with duplicates for Manufacturing records.
Does anyone have an intelligent way to address this problem?
Hello Brad,
Thank you for the very detailed post. Here are some articles that should help you better understand what some of the best practices:
Import My Organization’s Accounts and Contacts
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=import_my_organizations_accounts_and_contacts.htm&language=en_US
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=faq_import_contacts_can_the_import.htm&language=en_US
Importing My Contacts from Other Sources
https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=importing_my_contacts_csv.htm&language=en_US
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