Using Territories to Manage your Sales

Why use Territories?

 

If you have a global organisation then you probably work with territories/regions. These may represent standard territory names such as EMEA, APAC, Europe, N.A or they may represent internal classification. I.e one of my client uses his subsidiaries as territories. You might think “why do we need territories? We can use the account address to measure the organisation’s geographical spread instead”.  Obviously, you can, but what would you do if the CEO wants to get a report showing the status of sales in Europe this year? For this, you would need to create a report and include all the opportunities related to accounts records where the billing country is located in Europe. You could also filter all opportunities related to a specific salesperson who’s in charge of Europe. But again, what if you have several salespersons? What if some left this year and others joined instead? I believe you get the point: the geographical spread of the opportunities should not be measured by the specific salesperson.

So using territories for the problem above is great, but I usually go even one level deeper. I add sub-territories or sub-regions. This allows the organisation to have a more granular report on a specific territory. So for North American territory, we might have the following sub-territories: South East, South Central, North Central & North East. For EMEA we might use the Middle East, Israel and East Europe. It all depends on how the organisation split the territories.

How it’s done in Salesforce

Create a picklist under Lead and Account and name it Territory or Region. Make sure they contain the same values.

Create a picklist under Lead and Account and name it Sub Territory or Sub Region. Make sure they contain the same values.

Using Field Dependency under the Lead, map the Territory and Sub Territory picklists.

Use Map Lead Fields to map the two picklist fields to their corresponding fields under the account object.

Make sure the fields are marked as required when creating a new lead or account record by setting their property to required from the page layouts.

Sample Pipeline Chart for ROW by Sub Territories

 

 

Some Notes

 

You might be tempted to add a workflow that sets the account’s territory and sub-territory automatically by the value under Lead. Country and even assign it to a specific salesperson, but keep in mind that the account’s location doesn’t always indicate the correct territory. I.e, let’s assume I have a European distributor (which we manage as an account) and he manages an opportunity for a prospect located in North America. In this case, the prospect’s territory should be Europe and not North America.