Sharing for Overlays, Inside Sales, and an Acquisition
Crestline Health has 300 sales users and 60,000 accounts. Account sharing is Private; contacts are controlled by parent. Sales management follows the role hierarchy, but 40 clinical specialists sit in a separate product organization and need edit access to accounts tagged with their specialty. A 25-person inside sales team needs read-only access to every account in its region. An acquisition added 8,000 accounts that should be visible only to the 30-person acquisition integration team. Today the org has 150 account sharing rules and heavy manual sharing; reps lose access after account reassignment, and specialists file tickets weekly. Crestline has no Apex resources, wants to reduce admin effort, and has four months before the next selling year.
1. Recommend a declarative sharing design for the three populations. Explain which mechanism you would use for each and why.
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Keep Account organization-wide default Private and let the role hierarchy grant management visibility. Then use criteria-based sharing rules to public groups for repeatable population access:
- Clinical specialists: a public group per specialty, plus a criteria-based sharing rule on the account specialty field granting Edit to the matching group. This scales better than adding each specialist to every account.
- Inside sales: a public group per region, plus a criteria-based sharing rule granting Read Only where the account region matches. Inside sales should not get edit access just to see accounts.
- Acquisition accounts: a public group for the 30-person integration team, plus a criteria-based sharing rule on a legacy-company or acquisition flag granting Edit. Do not put these accounts in general region groups.
Use account teams only for named or strategic accounts that need per-account exceptions. Manual sharing should be an exception process, not the operating model. Enterprise Territory Management could model overlays, but with four months and no Apex, criteria-based sharing is the lower-risk first step unless territory-based forecasting is already a requirement.
2. Why do reps lose access after account reassignment, and how should Crestline prevent it?
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Access is usually lost for one of three reasons. First, the rep was relying on manual sharing that was never transferred. Second, a criteria-based sharing rule no longer matches because the account region or specialty field was not updated when ownership changed. Third, the new owner sits in a different part of the role hierarchy, so the old rep no longer inherits access through management.
The fix is to make sharing field-driven, not person-driven. Add a Flow on account owner change that updates region, specialty, and acquisition flag from the owner or a mapped territory. Keep criteria-based sharing rules dependent on those maintained fields. Audit manual shares and convert recurring ones into account teams or criteria rules. After bulk reassignments, recalculate sharing and verify with a test user in each region. Do not solve this by making accounts public; that would expose acquisition accounts and defeat the privacy requirement.
3. The org has 150 account sharing rules and performance is a concern. How would you simplify and govern the model?
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Start with an inventory: for each rule, record the criteria, target group, access level, business owner, and last review date. Remove rules that duplicate the role hierarchy or grant broader access than the business needs. Consolidate regional rules into fewer rules with well-maintained public groups, and replace person-specific groups with role- or attribute-based groups where possible.
Avoid overlapping rules that grant Edit where Read Only is sufficient. Use groups maintained by role or region, not manually curated lists. For large data loads or ownership changes, defer sharing calculation and recalculate afterward. Monitor sharing performance during peak loads and after rule changes.
Set a quarterly governance review: new sharing rule requests need a business owner and an expiration date for temporary access. Track the number of manual shares and specialist tickets as a health metric. The goal is not zero sharing rules; it is fewer, explainable rules that match how Crestline sells.