Manage Account Hierarchies

How do you manage account hierarchies during territory routing?

Account hierarchies make territory routing harder because related accounts may span multiple countries, segments, or ownership rules.

This walkthrough shows how BoogieBoard routes accounts through the node model and then reviews account families so teams can decide whether children should follow the parent or stay distributed across territories.

That gives RevOps a clearer way to handle parent-child logic without losing sight of the underlying territory rules.

Transcript

Manage account hierarchies using Boogie board. Before I can send accounts to territories, I need to first take them through my data model, figure out what team they're going to, what region they're in, what segment they're in, so on and so forth. So I've got my node structure built here along the left side of the screen. And this is basically like a Plinko board that figure outs where accounts are going to fall. Is the account in one of the North American countries and is it a certain size? It's going to flow into our North American Enterprise segment. Maybe an account is going to flow into our EMEA based on country and then one of the sub regions that we have also based on country in emea. Now for account families, there's a few different ways you can do it and it's all based around this node structure. I've got a view that shows me all the different families in my account base. And this is live piped in from, from Salesforce. We're going to examine the HSBC account hierarchy because they've got, accounts in lots of countries and of lots of different sizes. So it'll be a good example for us. You can see there's 96 accounts in this hierarchy.

And the parent account, the ultimate parent account, the one that all of the subsidiaries eventually roll up to, is located in Northern Europe. And if I scroll through the hierarchy, you can see they're assigned to all sorts of different branches. So some in Southern Europe, North America mid market, America mid market again, Northern Europe again, North American Enterprise. It's more Southern Europe. So they're sort of all over the board. Now as a sales team we probably want to have a more cohesive approach to them. So one way we can do that is by having the children group together to form a single, entity that is sold into by our sales team. And so I'm in my all accounts note here and I'm just going to check this button which says children follow account family parrot. I've got some additional options here that I'm not going to select yet and I'm going to apply that change. What Boogie board is doing is it sucking up all of the children and putting them with that ultimate parent. It's grouping them together so that they will all have the same bucket, they'll all Plinko into the same node.

When the operation is done, you'll see this little icon here which shows that at what level you've chosen to group your account families. You could do it at the lower levels, you could break it up. video. For this one we're just going to keep it really simple and show all subsidiaries following the parent with no exceptions. So if we go back and check out our HSBC account hierarchy, remember there's 96 accounts. They are now all sitting in Northern Europe, which means they're ready for territory distribution in our Northern European node. Our Northern European European rep is going to get access to all of the HSBC accounts from this view. I can also do some things like just manage, the account assignments manually. Roger Federer is my Northern European rep, so if I go ahead and click on his name, I'm going to get a pop up. It's going to say do you want to assign just this account or do you want to sign according to family rules? Or break it into a more specific subset? This allows you to keep these controls in place, manage things so that your users don't always have to remember to assign accounts either one by one or using the grouping.

But maybe you want to take a more granular approach. Maybe you don't want to just have one giant hierarchy globally that a single sales rep sells into based on the headquarters. Maybe you want to break it out by region. So here you can see that my icons are on my North American node, my Imean node and my APAC node and my box is checked within North America. Now what that's saying is that for all of the subsidiaries and all of the linked accounts that are in North America, suck those into one group of accounts. Do the same for EMEA and apac. That means that our sellers will be able to sell to all accounts each in a hierarchy within their region. And if we look at the HSBC example, you can see that we have more branches than just Northern Europe assigned. But we only have one branch in Europe, in emea, I should say one branch in North America. You can see all of the North American accounts have been moved into the Enterprise node and so on down the list. This allows us to keep things regional while also still maintaining that account family grouping. Now maybe you want something a bit more granular than just grouping at the regional level.

So here I have exceptions for specific hierarchies even within my emea, account hierarchies. So here I have a rule that's saying yes, all children within EMEA should follow their family parent unless the ARR is greater than 50k. I have a specific team that handles all of these strategic accounts and we don't want to group them with the prospects because we don't have that sales motion. If I look at the HSBC accounts that are filtered by ARR and in our EMEA group you can see that they are not all grouped in Northern Europe. They are flowing to either Southern Europe or DACH or whatever their country field is dictating. So you can add as many exclusions as you need for account hierarchies. Other examples of doing that would be if you can identify the buying center for certain account families and they buy separately from the rest of the family, you may wish to separate them. Or if you sell into different types of hierarchies, a franchise model is going to buy very different from a traditional hierarchy setup. You may choose to add that in here as an exclusion or you may have a simple override function.

And of course when you're actually designing territories via the suggestion engine, Boogie board is going to know how you want to handle account families. So you're telling your group in North America here to design based on the number of ultimate parents, the number of child accounts, account tier, current ARR and annual revenue, all filtered against my account family rules. So if I go in and actually click to design the territories, you'll see that I'll achieve a result that is attempting to solve for those balance goals per account family. And now I've got a number of results that I can page through of potential designs that are all based on solving for my balance goals across my account families. If I were to come in and make a change to a specific account, or if I were to have a sales leader come in and make a change to a specific account. Let's say this Cargill account I want to assign it to Emma Stone would again receive that same pop up that offers my controls for how we want to handle account families.

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