Advanced Territory Management

Question 1

How can you minimize performance issues related to account assignment rules?

How do you do this?

Answer 1

By applying inherited rules to child territories.

Select “Apply to child territories” on the assignment rules detail page.

Question 2

What’s the best way to reassign territories to other parent territories without impacting performance?

Why is it the best way?

What’s a caveat?

Answer 2

Start at the lowest hierarchy, make your changes, then move up the hierarchy level by level.

This avoids having to recalculate access levels to accounts, opportunities, contacts and cases for the same territories.

For territory models in the planning stage, this approach isn’t necessary.

Question 3

Best practices to reduce performance issues for assignment rules filters?

Answer 3

Define criteria on numeric fields, not string fields. Avoid defining numeric criteria as text, which slows performance - i.e. enter “1000” rather than “one thousand”.

Question 4

Another best practice to reduce performance issues for assignment rules filters?

Answer 4

Make them as restrictive as possible. Avoid including lots of “OR” conditions.

Question 5

What’s the ratio of number of territories to number of users assigned?

Answer 5

3 to 1

Question 6

If you’re required to add more than 1,500 users to a territory, what should you do?

Answer 6

Don’t use Setup. Manage user-to-territory assignment through the API.

Question 7

What’s a word of advice around “Evaluate this account against territory rules on save”.

Answer 7

Use caution. Set up Salesforce to run account assignment rules when an account is updated.

But it’ll run for all accounts, even if just 1 account was updated. So use these methods with caution.

Question 8

When making changes to the territory hierarchy, should you structure it off the user role hierarchy?

Answer 8

No. Access level to accounts, opportunities, contacts and cases that Enterprise Territory Management provides rolls up to the role hierarchy.

Question 9

Key differences between Role Hierarchy and Territory Hierarchy?

Answer 9

Role Hierarchy: Perfect for modelling management and HR types of reporting structures, where 1 person reports only to another person.

Territory Hierarchy: Best for modelling a matrix reporting structure, where someone can report to multiple managers.

Question 10

How can admins make sure that a team can see rolled-up forecast amounts for their territories?

Answer 10

Assign a forecast manager to every territory for which you want rolled-up forecast amounts.

Question 11

When a forecast manager is assigned…

Answer 11

Forecasts for the territory are available for the manager to view and adjust

Question 12

When a forecast manager is not assigned…

Answer 12

Forecasts for each forecast-enabled user assigned to the territory are available.

These users can view & adjust their own forecasts.

But they can’t do this for other users’ forecasts.

Question 13

How should you sync with a single source of truth?

Answer 13

Add an external ID field to the territory page layout.

Note: If you define your custom External ID field as unique, you can’t clone territory models.

Question 14

If you need more than 10 filter criteria fields - what should you do?

If criteria are based on account’s related records?

What’s the recommendation?

Answer 14

Use formula fields to combine multiple data fields on an account.

Use rollup summary fields or triggers to move data to the account. Then use these fields to drive account assignment rule criteria.

Use 6 fields or fewer.

Question 15

Territory management & data clean up…

Answer 15

Don’t use territory assignment rules to clean up data. Especially when determining which account to associate with a lead.

Question 16

What’s a named account?

Answer 16

Typically named after a company, rather than the sales territory it’s in.

Question 17

Best strategy for defining named accounts within the standard account assignment rule structure.

Answer 17

• Define accounts by name in the rule criteria
• Define criteria based on account numbers (more concise than account names)
• Define criteria based on attributes from the HQ account records (use formula field/apex to specify attributes from HQ account to all records in same account family)
• Develop a customised assignment solution - if the previous solutions provide appropriate scalability.

Question 18

How do you simplify frequent territory realignment?

Answer 18

As some customers realign monthly, weekly or daily.

These would benefit from an automated process that update the rule structure.

APIs can do this - automate maintenance of the standard account assignment rule structure.

Question 19

What does Enterprise Territory Management do and what does it not do…

Answer 19

It doesn’t automatically assign or change account owners.

But if multiple reps are assigned to 1 or more territories. Some customers assign a “dummy user” as a stand-in for the account owner.

Then they assign reps and roles to territories to model the rep-to-account association.

This reduces the need for recalculation - downstream record changes resulting from account owner updates.

Question 20

If you’re using Enterprise Territory Management, should you use account teams?

Answer 20

No.

Both features provide a mechanism for assigning the right reps to accounts, required access control to records and a rollup for reporting.

But ETM provides more hierarchical structure for rollup, forecasting and the ability to automatically assign reps to accounts.