Account Teams vs Enterprise Territory Management

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Aug 24

A lot of companies find themselves needing to manage a complex Account Management scheme out of Salesforce. They have complicated assignment rules, multiple team members responsible for different aspects of the customer relationship, etc.

When this is the case: the question becomes, what’s the right solution (Cloud Giants core value) and the two usual suspects are Account Teams and Enterprise Territory Management.

Account Teams and Enterprise Territory Management are really used primarily for:

Displaying “who is in charge of what?” on the Account.
Granting additional access to Accounts which those users might not otherwise have access to.

While various Trailhead modules, Help Documentation and Trailblazer forums provide some guidance, I always felt like the question was never fully answered and so I am sharing my perspective having solved this general design challenge in a number of different scenarios and situations for clients.

Here are questions to get you headed in the right direction.

1.) Do You Have Multiple Employees Responsible for the Account?

Some organizations have conflated “I have complex territory logic!” with “I need Territory Management” and that is an easy trap to fall into. But just because one sales team assigns Accounts based on NAICS/SIC Codes and the other based on State doesn’t mean you necessarily need to move away from the “One Account Owner” model.

If your answer is YES - move on to question #2.
If your answer is NO (you have only one Account Owner), my recommendation would be to avoid Account Teams and Enterprise Territory Management because in both cases, your data model becomes more complex. You will now store the “who is responsible for X” from the Account record to a child object. You now have to work harder to design and configure solutions to meet your requirements; to do things like create formula fields (e.g., create a field on Opportunity that shows the Profile of that Opp’s Account Owner) or create automation (e.g., when an Account field changes, send an email to the account manager).
- If you have complex logic but only one Account owner, consider options like:
  - Salesforce Lab’s Round Robin Assigner (available for free on the AppExchange)
  - Storing your assignment logic in a custom object / lookup table, which you then reference in triggered and scheduled Flows.
- Does what you’re trying to do involve the words “strategy” or “planning”? Salesforce Maps costs extra, but might be the right choice for your needs doing things like:
  - Designing territories (e.g., “how do I organize this so that territories make sense and are equitable among the reps on the team)
  - Planning road trips and optimizing routes when your reps are in the field, etc.

2.) Are Accounts Assigned With Hard Logic?

If you still feel you’re in the market for Account Teams or Enterprise Territory Management the question then becomes “how do we figure out to whom this Account goes?” and then “is that methodology fully based on hard and fast logic?”

The answer to this question may be more of a spectrum than I’m making it out to be, but we can usually come to some yes or no conclusion. And in that case…

Yes = Use Enterprise Territory Management

If you can systematize all the information you need to determine who an Account “goes to,” then Territories are your best bet. They’re not without challenges…

Admin interface is stuck in Classic
Limitations on when assignment rules run
Complex under-the-hood data model

But they’re still the solution that Salesforce intends you to use (always a best practice) and that works well for most needs.

Most commonly, we see Territories being a good fit when your model needs to factor in:

Geography (e.g., state, zip, region)
Industry (e.g., Industry picklist, NAICS/SIC code, etc.)
Company Size (e.g., annual revenue tier, current run rate)
Named Accounts (e.g., this CSM owns these 10 specific customers)
Product Line responsibility
Functional Role (e.g., manager vs. rep, sales vs. customer success

Territory Management makes it easy to account for (pardon the pun) attributes of the Account and assign it to the right people.

No = Use Account Teams

Usually account responsibility is not determined by “logic” because it needs to consider these factors:

Personality fit (e.g., they went to the same school)
Personal relationship / referral (e.g., they used to work together)
Experience / Skills (e.g., they have a specialized need that only X knows about)
Timing (e.g., “It’s been awhile for this person” or “this person’s available”)

All these reasons are difficult or essentially impossible to fully systematize in a database, and so manual assignment of responsibility at some point has to come into play. If that is the case, Account Teams are best - in part because that assignment can happen natively (aka no screen flows) and won’t require having to access Setup and involve Customize Application permissions.

NB: It is possible to forego Territory Management and instead develop a custom solution that automatically assigns Account Teams - probably some combination of custom objects/metadata and advanced Flows/Apex. To be honest, though, that would likely be hard to design right, a lot of effort to implement, difficult to scale and a pain to maintain. As usually, you’re probably better off keeping it simple (another Cloud Giants core value).