Our sales rep territories

01 Dec 2022
💬 EN

One of my favorite coding projects from work to use as a teaching tool has pertained to the way our sales representatives divide their territories.

The teaching example

1. Amjit Anush covers A-M inside the United States.
2. Benita Borges covers A-M outside of the United States.
3. Cathy Combs covers N-Z inside France.
4. Darweesh Daher covers N-Z outside of France.

The real world

In real life, prospective customers actually get assigned two representatives at a time:

1. a sales representative
2. a billing assistance representative

There are dozens of representatives on staff.

There are dozens of branches to the territory logic (and it’s different for sales vs. billing representatives). Considerations also include:

• the customer’s prior experience level with our product
• the customer’s connections to the U.S. military
• not only the customer’s geographic location, but their citizenship
• geographic splits not only by country, but all the way down to zip code
• not all names start with the 26 letters of the English alphabet
• …and more

In real life, sales rep territory assignment where I work is a beast of a flowchart!

• Q: And what’s even more fun?
• A: The rules change once or twice a year as staff join and leave the company.

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Find your sales rep webpage

My company’s public-facing corporate webpage hosts a “find your sales rep” webpage that looks something like this:

My last name starts with:
A-M
N-Z

I live in: Afghanistan Albania Algeria ...

(Note: the submit button is deliberately disabled in this example.)

Result

The result of clicking “Find my sales rep” displays something like this:

Benita Borges
(imagine a smiling photo of Benita here)
555-555-5555
[email protected]

Technical implementation

We’re powering this web page by letting the webpage’s form make HTTP calls to a “REST API” hole we poked into our Salesforce instance.

Here’s some sample code for such an API, which can be powered by a reusable implementation of the sales rep territory assignment flowchart (like an Apex Class or an Autolaunched Flow).

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Request more information webpage

My company’s public-facing corporate webpage hosts a “request more information” webpage that asks potential customers to submit more detailed information about themselves, such as:

1. name
2. email address
3. physical mailing address

Result

Every time a visitor submits this form, we create (or find and edit) 3 Salesforce records to capture the details they submitted:

1. a Contact record
2. a parent Account record for the contact
3. a child Opportunity record for the contact (via OpportunityContactRole)

We make sure that we always set the value of the OwnerId field on each of these 3 records using the same “sales rep territory” logic I’ve described in this article.

Technical implementation

We have 3 Apex triggers – one on Contact, one on Account, and one on Opportunity.

(Or 3 Record-Triggered Flows – we’re in the middle of playing around with whether Apex or Flow is a better trigger mechanism.)

Each of these 3 uses the same logic as the other for setting OwnerId. This makes all 3 great candidates to be powered by a shared, reusable implementation of the sales rep territory assignment flowchart (like an Apex Class or an Autolaunched Flow).

That said, as of 2022, Record-Triggered Flows that run in the efficient “before” state can’t delegate their work to Apex or other Flows, so the 3 triggers really ought to be Apex triggers, even if the sales rep territory assignment flowchart is implemented with Autolaunched Flow.