CIO — As I've written before, CRM systems are the most political of all enterprise software. This is because the sales and marketing users are inherently competitive and driven by incentives that make them even more so. In the drive for this quarter's compensation and eventual promotion, sales guys will fight for lower quotas and better territories, sometimes trying to grab deals from an inattentive colleague or channel partner. Whether in large organizations or small, this may be baked in as part of the sales culture.

Consequently, setting the boundaries of a rep's territory and defining the rules of engagement for sales teams is a key to proper sales management. The goal is to prevent channel conflict and limit chaos while stimulating the competitive spirit that leads to high sales achievement. This can get complicated even in a company with 20 sales reps, but the mechanisms can be truly Byzantine in a large multi-channel organization. Sales management may set rules of engagement along these lines:

• A rep's territory is principally defined by geography, but the chunks on the map can vary from a group of states like the Dakotas down to just part of Manhattan. I've even seen Las Vegas divided into two territories according to even and odd addresses along the strip. Unfortunately, the territories are rarely defined by easy parameters like ZIP codes.

• Most rep's territories will be geographically exclusive within the scope of that sales team, but some high-potential areas will be shared between two reps on the same team. Almost inevitably, these shared territories aren't complete overlaps.

• Even small sales organization may have several levels (e.g., telesales, outside sales, national account management, and channel sales) that overlay. All too often, these overlays are not congruent (for example, a telesales rep's territory may straddle two or more outside sales reps).

• In many industries, the geographic territories are for "generic" business — the real gold comes from national accounts (e.g., the Fortune 500) or other non-geographic customers (e.g., U.S. government agencies or multi-national banks). These accounts are treated as their own territory, defined by the name of the corporate entity (which can be a real challenge for customers like The Walt Disney Company (DIS) that own ESPN, ABC (ABCB) TV, and Buena Vista music).

• Territories may drive some interesting visibility and access control rules. For example, most reps need to know that Lockheed Martin (LMT) is a customer, but it's none of their business to know any of the account details, the contacts, the channel partners, or the deal history. These access rules can become quite complicated in a multi-channel sales environment.

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