In this article by Mohith Shrivastava, the author of Salesforce Essentials for Administrators, we will look into the typical sales cycle and the territory management feature of Salesforce.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

A typical sales cycle starts from a campaign. An example of a campaign can be a conference or a seminar where marketing individuals explain the product offering of the company to their prospects. Salesforce provides a campaign object to store this data. A campaign may involve different processes, and the campaign management module of Salesforce is simple. A matured campaign management system will have features such as sending e-mails to campaign members in bulk, and tracking how many people really opened and viewed the e-mails, and how many of them responded to the e-mails. Some of these processes can be custom built in Salesforce, but out of the box, Salesforce has a campaign member object apart from the campaign where members are selected by marketing reps. Members can be leads or contacts of Salesforce. A campaign generates leads. Leads are the prospects that have shown interest in the products and offerings of the company.

The lead management module provides a lead object to store all the leads in the system. These prospects are converted into accounts, contacts, and opportunities when the prospect qualifies as an account. Salesforce provides a Lead Convert button to convert these leads into accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Features such as Web-to-Lead provided by the platform are ideal for capturing leads in Salesforce.

Accounts can be B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). B2C in Salesforce is represented as person accounts. This is a special feature that needs to be enabled by a request from Salesforce. It’s a record type where person accounts fields are from contacts.

Contacts are people, and they are stored in objects in the contact object. They have a relationship with accounts (a relationship can be both master-detail as well as lookup.)

An opportunity generates revenue if its status is closed won. Salesforce provides an object known as opportunities to store a business opportunity. The sales reps typically work on these opportunities, and their job is to close these deals and generate revenue. Opportunities have a stage field and stages start from prospecting to closed won or closed lost.

Opportunity management provided by Salesforce consists of objects such as opportunity line items, products, price books, and price book entries.

Products in Salesforce are the objects that are used as a lookup to junction objects such as an opportunity line item. An opportunity line item is a junction between an opportunity and a line item.

Price books are price listings for products in Salesforce. A product can have a standard or custom price book. Custom price books are helpful when your company is offering products at discounts or varied prices for different customers based on market segmentation.

Salesforce also provides a quote management module that consists of a quote object and quote line items that sales reps can use to send quotes to customers.

The Order management module is new to the Salesforce CRM, and Salesforce provides an object known as orders that can generate an order from the draft state to the active state on accounts and contracts. Most companies use an ERP such as a SAP system to do order management. However, now, Salesforce has introduced this new feature, so on closed opportunities from accounts, you can create orders.

The following screenshot explains the sales process and the sales life cycle from campaign to opportunity management:

To read more, I would recommend that you go through the Salesforce documentation available at http://www.salesforce.com/ap/assets/pdf/cloudforce/SalesCloud-TheSalesCloud.pdf.

Territory management

This feature is very helpful for organizations that run sales processes by sales territories. Let’s say you have an account and your organization has a private sharing model. The account has to be worked on by sales representatives of the eastern as well as western regions. Presently, the owner is the sales rep of the eastern region, and because of the private sharing model, the sales rep of the western region will not have access. We could have used sharing rules to provide access, but the challenge is also to do a forecasting of the revenue generated from opportunities for both reps, and this is where writing sharing rules simply won’t help us. We need the territory management feature of Salesforce for this, where you can retain opportunities and transfer representatives across territories, draw reports based on territories, and share accounts across territories extending the private sharing model. The key feature of this module is that it works with customizable forecasting only.

Basic configurations

We will explore the basic configuration needed to set up territory management. This feature is not enabled in your instance by default. To enable it, you have to log a case with Salesforce and explain its need.

The basic navigation path for the territories feature is Setup | Manage Users | Manage Territories.

Under Manage Territories, we have the settings to set the default access level for accounts, contacts, opportunities, and cases. This implies that when a new territory is created, the access level will be based on the default settings configured.

There is a checkbox named Forecast managers can manage territories. Once checked, forecast managers can add accounts to territories, manage account assignment rules, and manage users.

Under Manage Territories | Settings, you can see two different buttons, which are as follows:

• Enable Territory Management: This button forecasts hierarchy, and data is copied to the territory hierarchy. Each forecast hierarchy role will have a territory automatically created.
• Enable Territory Management from Scratch: This is for new organizations. On clicking this button, the forecast data is wiped, and please note that this is irreversible.

Based on the role of the user, a territory is automatically assigned to the user. On the Territory Details page, one can use Add Users to assign users to territories.

Account assignment rules

To write account assignment rules, navigate to Manage Territories | Hierarchy. Select a territory and click on Manage Rules in the list related to the account assignment rules.

Enter the rule name and define the filter criteria based on the account field. You can apply these rules to child territories if you check the Apply to Child Territories checkbox.

There is a lot more to explore on this topic, but that’s beyond the scope of this book. To explore more, I would recommend that you read the documentation from Salesforce available at https://na9.salesforce.com/help/pdfs/en/salesforce_territories_implementation_guide.pdf.

Summary

In this article, we have looked at how we can use the territory management feature of Salesforce. We have also described a typical sales cycle.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Introducing Salesforce Chatter [article]
• Salesforce CRM Functions [article]
• Configuration in Salesforce CRM [article]