The Business Problem

A mid-market building products manufacturer runs 6 independent sales divisions, each with its own field org, territories, and customer relationships. Two of those divisions sell to the same customers and compete for account ownership. Territory changes were a painful, manual process: sales ops would redraw boundaries in spreadsheets, then spend days running data loads to update Salesforce, the ERP, and access controls. Reps would lose visibility into their accounts for days after every territory change. New accounts sat unrouted until someone manually assigned them.

The cost was real: missed follow-ups, duplicate outreach from competing divisions, reps working accounts outside their territory, and a sales ops team spending more time on data hygiene than strategic planning.

What I Built

A fully automated territory assignment and access control system inside Salesforce that propagates territory changes in real time—from the moment a territory boundary is redrawn in Salesforce Maps to the moment a rep sees updated account access in their CRM. The system handles the full lifecycle: geographic assignment, business-logic-driven ownership derivation, access control provisioning, ERP synchronization, and exception reporting.

The core architectural insight was separating two concepts the business had been conflating: geographic rep (which rep covers this zip code) and selling rep (which rep actually owns this account for a given product line). Geographic assignment is pure geometry—a 50,000-record zip-to-territory lookup. Selling rep assignment is business logic—an Apex engine that evaluates ERP sales history, customer type restrictions, manual overrides, and geographic defaults to determine the right owner across 7 business units.

How It Handles Complexity

The hardest problem was shared ownership between two divisions selling to the same customers. When an account has no sales history with either division, both reps need access—but when one division has an established relationship, that rep takes priority. The system resolves this through a priority chain: customer type restrictions first, then ERP-sourced account assignments, then geographic defaults. Accounts with split ownership store both reps in a comma-separated field, and Enterprise Territory Management rules use CONTAINS matching to grant access to both. Every downstream system—ETM rules, Territory Planning datasets, the account display component—was designed to handle this pattern cleanly.

Territory redraws trigger a four-case decision matrix per business unit per account: if the selling rep was in sync with geography, the system updates automatically and flags the ERP for notification. If the selling rep was an intentional override, the system skips the update and logs it to an exception report for manager review. No override goes unexamined after a territory change.

Technical Stack

Results

Territory change propagation went from days of manual data loads to real-time. Rep assignment is fully automated across all 198,000+ accounts and 6 divisions. Exception reporting gives managers complete visibility into every account where an override was preserved during a territory redraw. The architecture was designed to scale from 6 to 13 divisions with no structural changes—just configuration.

Sales ops shifted from spending their time on data loads and access requests to actually planning territories and optimizing coverage.

Overview

The target persona is a commercial electrical contractor who could become a certified installation partner. The email doesn't sell hardware directly; it sells the demand signal the prospect didn't know existed in their own zip code. Every red dot on the embedded map represents a real funded commercial site that needs an installer, and the contractor's office is pinned at the center.

The Pipeline

How It Works

Federal and state grant databases (NEVI, TCEQ, TxVEMP, VW Settlement Fund) are scraped and normalized into a table of funded commercial sites with lat/lon, grant amount, and installation status. For each prospect, a spatial query using scikit-learn's BallTree pulls all funded sites within 10 miles that have no assigned installer.

The map is rendered as a CSS grid of real OpenStreetMap tile images at zoom level 11, with absolutely-positioned red dots computed via Mercator projection math, a dashed SVG radius circle, and a blue HQ pin. Zero JavaScript dependencies. Each map is a self-contained static image that can be rasterized to PNG or embedded inline in an email.

Why It Works

• Pattern interrupt: A personalized map in a cold email is visually jarring. The prospect sees their own city, their own neighborhood, their own HQ pinned on a map surrounded by red dots. That's hard to ignore.
• Data-backed urgency: Every dot represents real grant funding that will expire. The email doesn't make vague claims about "market opportunity"; it shows specific, verifiable demand in the prospect's backyard.
• Scalable personalization: The pipeline generates a unique map for every prospect. The marginal cost of personalizing the 1,000th email is the same as the 1st.

Projected Impact

• Open rate lift: Personalized visual subject lines consistently outperform generic copy by 2-3x in B2B outbound benchmarks
• Reply rate target: 8-12% vs. 1-3% industry average, driven by the map as a tangible value-add
• Pipeline coverage: A single GTM engineer can cover an entire state's electrical contractor base in a week
• CAC reduction: Estimated 15-20x throughput improvement per rep vs. manual research and custom decks