Geographies give administrators and sales managers an extra layer of flexibility in segmenting their business. Administrators can create geographical hierarchies, associate them with a territory program, and then assign geographies to territories and even track historical sales performance at a geographic level.
Geographies can be managed as a hierarchy and can be customized to suit your requirements. For example, your organization relies on Geographies that use a simple region, country/region, state, and county metaphor, while other organizations choose to focus on postal codes or branch locations.
Only one Geography can be assigned to a Territory Program. Territory Programs can also use geographies as a dimension to create granular quotas. Once a geography has been associated with a Territory Program, any node from within that Geography hierarchy can be assigned to a territory within that program. You cannot delete a geography if it is used in a Territory Program.
A geography can also be used as a dimension for calculating historical results. The Historical Data section includes a column for Geography. For a historical transaction to be considered relevant to a given territory, that territory’s definition must include the same Account, Product, and Geography as the transaction. Any level of a Geography hierarchy (or no Geography at all) can be used as an entry in the Historical Transactions table, however, you must ensure that transactions intended for association with a given territory definition are counted only once.
You can create geographies manually or you can import geography data using Excel or the Express Data Loader (XDL). Importing data to Territory and Quota is covered in Unit 8. When mapping geographies, you can also import a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file for exact geography definitions.
The following options are available from the Geography Workspace:
| Name | Description |
 Column Search | Filter records by searching any columns. |
 Create | Create a new geography. |
 Copy | Copy a geography. |
 Upload | Upload a spreadsheet to add geography data. You cannot update existing geography information using this feature. |
 Download | Download a spreadsheet that contains data for all existing geographies. Also download a template spreadsheet to populate data that you can later upload. |
 Delete | Select geographies to delete. |
 Select Columns | Customize the columns shown in the workspace. |