Winning sports teams – and for some reason I’m thinking of the San Francisco Giants here – are a collection of outstanding athletes that work together to win the game.  Closing a sales opportunity is like winning a championship; it takes an entire team of individuals working closely together to win. 

Here at salesforce.com, we understand how important effective team selling is to the success of your sales organization and we have listened to your feedback on the IdeaExchange on how we can improve our Sales Team solution.  That is why we are excited to announce that as part of Winter ’13 Release, Sales Team within Salesforce is now a customizable entity. Customizable Sales Team allows you to gain even more control over how you define and extend your Sales Team within the application.

Here’s an overview of these new capabilities, with some examples.

• Custom Fields: Your Salesforce Administrator now has the ability to extend the Sales Team on an Opportunity to add a custom field.  For example, define a custom lookup field to product to capture which sales team members are responsible for selling different products on the opportunity.  Once an administrator adds these custom fields to the definition of Sales Team, users can create their sales teams with appropriate data accordingly.

• Triggers: An APEX code can be triggered now on certain actions related to Sales Team.  For example, an email can be automatically sent to all sales team members or an update can be automatically posted on the opportunities chatter feed whenever a new sales team member is added to or deleted from the sales team.
• Validation Rules: Enforce a custom validation – specific to your organization – on the Sales Team.  For example, create a custom mandatory field on Sales Team, which is required to be filled for every sales team member working on an opportunity.
• Page Layouts: To address specific business needs for different business divisions, administrators can now set up multiple page layouts for sales teams on an opportunity for different groups within your organization.
• Custom Buttons and Links: Previously, only the opportunity owner – or someone on their management chain – could add a sales team member to an opportunity.  Now with Customizable Sales Team, administrators can include a custom button or link on the Sales Team to launch a Visual Force Page with custom APEX code to override this behavior, enabling any sales team member to add someone to the sales team.
• Support in Custom Report Types: Customizable Sales Team can now be included in a Custom Report Type created by your Salesforce administrator, and all the custom fields created on Sales Team are now reportable.  This enables visibility into the performance of the sales team.

It’s never been this easy to extend the Sales Team to meet your growing business needs.  And we are not stopping here!  In future releases we plan to extend the solution to support credit splits on opportunities, which will enable multiple sales representatives working on a single opportunity to roll their respective revenue contribution into their forecasts, quota and pipeline reports.  We also plan to support workflows for Sales Team.  Keep in mind; our Safe Harbor Statement applies to any forward-looking claims we make about future releases.

We hope you enjoy the customizability aspect of Sales Team.  Let us know what you’d like to see in the next release.  For details about new features for Customizable Sales Team, see the Salesforce Winter ’13 Release Notes.