That’s not a typo — the powerful (but underutilized) feature know as Salesforce Divisions can actually help break down silos within your company!
Read on to learn more about the capabilities of Salesforce Divisions and how you could leverage this to improvement your team alignment.
Salesforce Divisions: A Definition
Divisions have been around since the Winter ’05 release, but I’m always surprised to find that many people don’t know that this feature is available.
Divisions are a classification that can be assigned to users and other kinds of records. Setting up Divisions lets you segment data into logical sections that match your internal structure – which makes results in searches, reports, and list views more meaningful to users.
In orgs with a large amount of data (whether that’s a product of being long time Salesforce users or having many data-intensive business processes) this can work wonders in eliminating “clutter.”
Possible divisions could include things like:
- Business Units
- Geographic Regions
- Product Group
- Vertical Market
- Anything that’s relevant to your business!
The Use Case for Salesforce Divisions
Most often when I recommend Divisions to customers it stems from one of more of the following key requirements:
- The firm is on Professional Edition or above
- The organization includes 3+ Business Units that generally function independently, but that occasionally cross-collaborate on National or Global Accounts
- There are standardized processes across the organization that need to be kept consistent. For example, there is a defined sales process with a shared meaning for each stage (i.e. “Negotiation” would have one definition – not represent 30% complete for one Business Unit and at 70% for another.)
- The firm has a need for (or a goal to establish) both Business-Unit-specific and Org-Wide analytics
Divisions work best in companies that have adopted a public data model, ideally the org wide sharing is public for most (if not all) objects.
In most instances when I’ve recommended Divisions to a customer, there is a private data model with complex sharing rules and lots of support requests to open data back up to users for one-off scenarios. The initial reason for the private model and complexity, as I understood it from the customers, was typically due to complaints from users in a public data model about “too much noise” when having to sift through other Business Units’ records in Searches, List Views and Reports.
How to Leverage Salesforce Divisions
To get started with Divisions, your System Admin will need to get in touch with Salesforce Support to activate the feature. Generally, they’ll request for Org ID and more about your use case. I would recommend sharing just high-level bullet points on your company’s structure and what you are trying to accomplish with reporting and collaborated.
Once the Divisions feature has been turned on, a “Default Division” will need to be assigned to each user (Note: this is a new field entirely and is different from the standard text field labeled “Division!”)
Each Lead and Account record as well as any Custom Object that is a “parent” in a Master-Detail relationship will need to be assigned to a Division. These can be set with native transfer utilities and/or a DataLoader. (Shameless plug: our free DataLoader on the AppExchange works really well for this.)
Divisions propagate down from the parent to all child objects. For example, the Division of an Account will update all Contacts, Cases and Opportunities related to the Account.
From there, you can update your List Views and Reports to filter by the Running User’s Division — but the cool thing is that the User can change the filter of any Report or change his/her default Search Division to be any specific Division or the “All Divisions” option.
A Few Final Considerations About Divisions
In the Divisions documentation in Help & Training, there is a note indicating that you may benefit from Divisions if your Org has more than one million records. This is not a hard and fast requirement for getting this enabled. In my experience, if you can present a solid business case to your Support Rep, they’re happy to turn the feature on.
turning on Divisions; simply make a sound business case to your Support Rep and, in my experience, the feature will be turned on
Child records cannot cross Divisions – so in other words, you couldn’t have an Account in the “Global” Division with Opportunities, some of which are in the “U.S.” Division and others in the “U.K.” Division. Division is always inherited down from the parent record.
Divisions is not a Security feature. It is merely about minimizing the day-to-day “noise” across Divisions while still allowing for Org-wide visibility, effective reporting, and collaboration. If you’re concerned about security a more appropriate feature to consider is Territories which is deeply entrenched in Security and far more appropriate for a private data model.
Once Divisions is enabled, it cannot be disabled! Definitely try this in the Sandbox (or, if you are on PE, in a Dev Org) and testing rigorously before pushing into Production.
What Questions Do You Have on Salesforce Divisions?
Have an example to share? Have lingering questions or an out-of-the-box use case? We like a challenge — let us know in the comments!