Question: Sales Organization Structure in salesforce

[Maxi]

Hello Community,

in our company the sales is organized in the following hierarchy:

1. Sales region (e.g. Europe)
2. Sales division (e.g. Central Europe)
3. Country (e.g. Germany)

We built our salesforce role hierarchy like this, to be able to report sales by country. This works for around 70-80%.

However we are facing problems if

• A sales person from one country creates an Opportunity for another country.
• A sales division manager creates an Opportunity.

In this case the Opportunity revenue is not reflected in a reporting by country.

What are your ideas / best practice to solve this "problem"?
Do you know configurative / organizational ways to solve this issue?

Many thanks in advance.

[TuPeuxPasTest]

Hello,

To rely on user roles for the reporting of sales is perfect in a world where each sales rep. is assigned a distinct territory and doesn't cross borders.

However it is so handy to navigate using the role hierarchy that it's worth doing some workarounds.

For the first case (create an opp. for another country) I would assign the opportunity to the other country's manager and keep a specific "share" (use the sharing on opportunity on an individual base) to the initial sales rep. But in this case, it has impact on individual turnover and quota achievement...

I think the answer should come clearer if you discuss with sales management in your company, because these are not technical issues, but organisational issues.

For the second case, the answer should also come from the question "who gets commissioned ?"

Best regards,

Christophe

[JCoppedge]

I believe territory management is geared to this style of problem, but haven't personally used it.  Have you looked into it?

Another option would be to create a picklist field - something like "Country Override".  This field would have the list of all possible countries, and the option to be left blank.

formula field:

1) If the above field is blank, use the reporting label of the role hierarchy.

2) Otherwise use the picklist value in the override field.

 Then change your reports to reference the formula field.

The only quirk to this implementation is that you'd have to use the role of the opportunity creator in the formula (not the opportunity owner, for some reason this is not an option).  Last modified by is an option as well.

You could use a validation rule to make the override field required if the opp creator isn't the current opp owner.

Not perfect but might work in your org... cheers,

John

[Maxi]

Thank you for your replies.

I already tried to setup this with two fields. The picklist is no problem. However I have trouble with the formula field: I can't access attributes (region) from the Owner of the Opportunity (the system doesn't let me select fields from there).

Any ideas?

[JCoppedge]

How many users is your org?  You could create a formula to translate the owner ID to the role using a case statement, but you might end up passing the 5k compiled character limit for formulas.  You would need to update this formula with each new user as well.

[Maxi]

We have 300 Users (which are changing regularly). So a hardcoded formular field would be no option .

Do you have any other ideas?

Thank you.

[JCoppedge]

Sounds like you'd need a trigger developed to copy the owner role to the opp.  That should be relatively simple/low cost, assuming you want to go the picklist route.