This year has been full of surprises for sales professionals working in the Salesforce ecosystem – from the Salesblazer movement and community group, to dedicated learning resources and even a brand new Salesforce Sales Representative certification. In true Salesforce fashion, this is most likely just the tip of the iceberg!
As I’m sure everyone can agree, selling in general can easily be classified as a team sport with multiple individuals chiming in to ensure a seamless end-to-end customer experience. Needless to say, all this effort has to be tracked, measured, and rewarded – here’s where the #AwesomeAdmins and enhanced Salesforce functionality come into play. Let’s find out how you can leverage this functionality to set your team up for success.
We’ll be exploring the following areas:
- How easy your Team Selling in Salesforce can be
- Account and Opportunity Teams, including Opportunity and Product Splits
- Enterprise Territory Management, including Territory Planning
- Enhance the Team Selling experience with Slack and Pipeline Inspection
Team Selling in Salesforce
While each company has their own sales process, business rules, and intricacies, Salesforce offers out-of-the-box products and functionality to help you translate business requirements into an actual working solution within your CRM. This functionality can also account for any potential exceptions, as well as the considerations required for different teams – which is bound to happen.
Ultimately, our goal as Salesforce professionals is to understand these business needs, know the tools we have at our disposal, and utilize all the great functionality Salesforce has to offer – all in a way that allows teams to access the right information, collaborate effectively, and take swift action to see that success confetti at the end of every deal!
In this post, we will explore the out-of-the-box team selling setup options Salesforce has to offer: Enterprise Territory Management (ETM) and Account Teams. Not only can both be leveraged for different situations, but you can also customize the way they are being used to fit the moving parts of your sales process.
Account and Opportunity Teams
Account Teams are perhaps one of the features Account Owners will be thrilled about! Suitable for ad hoc collaboration, both Account and Opportunity Teams allow the Account Owner to add colleagues in different roles and define their level of access accordingly. At the Account level, access can be defined for the Account itself, but also for the related Opportunities, Cases, and Contacts.
On top of this, each user can define their default Account and Opportunity teams at their users level – this functionality will enable them to add their predefined team with just one click! Each team member also has a role, which is ultimately a picklist to be customized according to your internal nomenclature.
Once the functionality starts being used, reporting can be done with ease to determine the involvement of different team members on various Accounts, as well as Opportunities.
Opportunity and Product Splits
Once Opportunity Teams are enabled, the conversation pertaining to attribution and compensation will surely follow. Opportunity Splits will help with exactly that – knowing the allotted percentage for each team member who participates in driving the successful closure of the Opportunity.
Opportunity Splits have been around for a long time, but Product Splits is a brand new addition which will become generally available along the Summer ‘23 release. This functionality offers even granular definition of splits, allowing percentages to be distributed between team members at the Opportunity Product level.
Each organization can define their own split type and if they wish to make use of the Product Splits or not. In addition, they can now make use of the Opportunity Splits Lightning Component for a clear view into the revenue, overlay as well as custom split distribution between team members for a particular Opportunity.
Both Opportunity Splits and Product Splits can be easily added and edited directly from this component, and once Product Splits are defined, the Opportunity Split percentage is automatically recalculated. Opportunity Splits are locked and can’t be edited when Opportunity Product Splits are defined for a given Opportunity.
As you would expect, this data is fully reportable and forcastable – therefore allowing the operations teams to deep dive and organize the data either by User, Product, Role, and so on.
For example, if a new product is launched to a limited number of customers, you can easily note the associated revenue, as well as different team contributions, varying from sellers, to – why not – even dedicated product marketing managers who contributed to the deal.
Enterprise Territory Management
In comparison with Account Teams, Enterprise Territory Management is another out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality that introduces a more scalable and refined way of defining who should work on certain Accounts, Opportunities, and even Leads. It can also give them the right access from one single place: the Territory.
Enterprise Territory Management can be enabled directly in Setup, after which the Territory Model and Territory Hierarchy can be built. Depending on your organization’s choice, the functionality can also be extended to Leads, ensuring a consistent way to potentially enable access to these core standard Objects. Let’s explore the available options once ETM is enabled!
It’s important to note that, in comparison with the Account Teams functionality, ETM is systematic, rule-based, and can handle large data volumes, removing the need to update individual Accounts. Account fields can be used when defining these rules, such as Industry, Annual Revenue, or even postal codes.
While Accounts can be manually assigned to Territories if exceptions arise, your company can plan and build the Territories and Territory Hierarchy in such a way that the assignment may require little to no manual intervention once the rules are run.
The scalability of ETM truly shines in terms of collaboration and tracking. Considering both Users and Accounts can be assigned to multiple Territories simultaneously, access will be accounted for through the predefined access levels, and reporting and forecasting can be fully driven from a Territory level.
From an implementation perspective, ETM can be enabled and fully tested in a sandbox to account for all of the desired scenarios it should cover. You can then decide on potential customization specific to the way your business is structured.
Territory Planning
If you have worked in an organization using Enterprise Territory Management, you may have heard that the planning process and organization of the Territories is often time consuming for operations teams and sales leadership – especially until the final state is agreed. But what if this could be easily avoided?
Territory Planning was designed by the team behind Salesforce Maps, but is not really conditioned by a geographical Territory Setup at all. In four straightforward steps, the agreed Territory Model and allocations can be sent right in your Salesforce instance. Along the way, the data source of your choice can be used, even local Excel files for that matter, and different models can be created to drive the final decision.
Territory Planning is not necessarily conditioned by geographical aspects, and using ETM in your organization is not a must either – you can still use Account Teams and publish the assignments directly within them after the planning exercise.
With an update in the Summer ’23 Salesforce release, Territory Planning is sure to handle large volumes of data even faster, with the possibility of processing updates in parallel, and even setting the batch size.
User Experience
In addition to the well-known Account Teams and highly scalable Enterprise Territory Management, Salesforce also has other out-of-the-box functionality available to help your teams take action in next to no time!
Pipeline Inspection is the one-stop-shop for key pipeline metrics, offering visibility into week-over-week changes, predefined filters for both Opportunity Teams as well as Territories, in-line editing, and even AI-Powered insights. Since March 2023, Pipeline Inspection has been available without an add-on license for Enterprise Edition too, enabling even more customers to make use of this functionality without an extra cost.
Slack for Sales is yet another way teams can rapidly collaborate within Account or Opportunity dedicated channels, as well as celebrate with everyone involved when the deals are successfully closed! Not only is this integration sure to keep the momentum for the team members actively discussing the close plan, but admins can also automatically trigger the dedicated Slack channel creation right from Salesforce, invite users, and more!
Final Thoughts
All in all, Salesforce has the potential to make your company’s team selling experience a dream come true, while catering for the various details of every implementation. By properly making use of the out-of-the-box functionality, not only can you reduce the time needed to build everything from scratch, but you will also have a steady base for any additional customizations as needed.
With significant improvements related to this topic appearing with almost every release, it will become easier and easier to satisfy even the most complex requirements and business models.