Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Managing Territories

Territories, teams, and business units are three organizational concepts that are so closely linked that you need to understand all three before deciding how to handle any one of them.

Territories are customer records managed and maintained by one or more people in an organization. A team is a group of users who work together on specific records. As one can imagine, some records might contain sensitive information and some may contain information that may be viewed by others but not edited. For example, Person A reports to a Manager A who reports to Region Manager A. Region Manager A has full access to all his own records as well as those accounts managed by his subordinates. The subordinates in turn cannot edit accounts that are outside their territories or managed directly by a supervisor. A business unit, then, is where an administrator creates and manages security settings that dictate who can access what information.

Typically, you establish territories to manage sales in bite-sized chunks. You probably want to develop a sales quota for your company in each territory and then check forecasted sales and closed sales against the quotas you've set. (We talk more about assigning quotas and forecasting sales in Chapter 11.) You may also want to use territories as a way to ensure that customers are equitably distributed among salespeople. By using Microsoft CRM, you can measure equitable distribution by geography, the number of customers, account revenue, ...