Clari supports both the Salesforce Role Hierarchy and Territory Management. In fact, Clari relies on your Role Hierarchy or Territory Management in Salesforce to ensure that each user sees what they expect to see when they log into their Clari account. The Role Hierarchy is the standard hierarchy in Salesforce, while the Territory Management has to be enabled in Salesforce
There are benefits and drawbacks to the Role Hierarchy and Territory Management. I’m not an expert, but I can certainly speak to some of them as they relate to Clari. In this topic, I’m going to focus on how you can address a specific challenge as it relates to the Role Hierarchy.
Role Hierarchy: Benefits and Drawbacks
The Role Hierarchy allows you to be extremely straightforward in that each opportunity is owned by one rep. It’s really easy for reps to run queries for the opportunities that they own, and it’s easy for managers to run queries for the opportunities that their reps own.
- All users are assigned to one Role
- All users own their deals
- If a user switches Roles, they take their deals with them
The Challenge
The Role Hierarchy gets tricky when reps are moving around (physically across the country or globe). Because users take their deals with them, this can result in incorrect deal history within a region/territory, and inaccurate analytics within Clari if a user moves to a new team, for example. Your user assignments can therefore become very messy as your sales organization grows and you build an inside sales team, or a channels team, for example.
Below, I’ve outline (at a high level) a few common scenarios for rep or manager movement and the options you have to address each if you’re concerned about preserving your deal history and historical analytics (tip: you can also find these scenarios in the Knowledge Base if that’s your preference).
When a Rep Leaves a Company
Option A
- All of the deals that the rep owns will continue to show up in their team roll-up in your hierarchy.
- Re-assigned any remaining open deals that the rep previously owned to their former manager to keep them associated with the rep’s inactive Salesforce license until you are able to backfill their role.
Option B
- Create a placeholder user with the inactive Salesforce license of the rep so that their deals continue to show up in the roll-up in Forecast.
- We recommend renaming the rep's inactive Salesforce user and giving the user a unique email alias with the instructions found here: Placeholder Users in Forecast.
When a Rep Joins a New Team
Option A
Reassign the deals that the rep previously owned to either their previous manager or another rep on their previous team. Otherwise, if you are using the Salesforce Role Hierarchy, the deals will follow the rep to their new team. The same goes for any deals that the rep closed in their previous role. Reassign the historical opportunities so they don’t follow the rep to the new team.
Option B
Use an inactive SFDC license to own the user’s old opportunities until you are able to backfill their role on their old team. Remember, we recommend renaming the rep’s inactive Salesforce user and giving the user a unique email alias with the instructions found here: Placeholder Users in Forecast.
When a Rep is Promoted to a Manager
Option A
Create a new user for the new manager and keep their old closed-won deals assigned to the old user license they previously used as a rep.
Option B
- Update the rep’s role within your SFDC hierarchy to reflect their new position.
- Wait for User Management to refresh. You can learn more about the intervals on which the data in Clari refreshes in our article on Data Refresh Intervals.
- Once his new role in the hierarchy is reflected in User Management, update the user’s Clari Role and Forecast Settings.
- Reassign any closed deals the user had as a rep to either a placeholder user or another sales rep on their previous team until their position is backfilled so that the deals continue to roll up to their previous team and do not affect any historical conversion rates in the Analyze Modules.
