We’re hitting custom object storage limits in our territory management module and it’s blocking new territory assignments. Our sales ops team has been building out detailed territory hierarchies with custom objects to track regional performance metrics, competitive data, and market segmentation rules. We started getting errors last week when trying to create new territory records.
The error message shows:
Storage quota exceeded for custom objects
Current usage: 98.7% of allocated limit
Territory assignments suspended
I need to understand our options around custom object storage quotas and whether we can export historical data via API to free up space. We also need to maintain historical reporting integration for our quarterly reviews. Has anyone dealt with retention policy setup for territory data while keeping compliance requirements intact?
I’ve seen this before with territory management scaling issues. First thing to check is whether you’re storing unnecessary metadata in custom objects. Territory hierarchies can balloon quickly if you’re duplicating reference data that could be normalized. Review your custom object schema and see if any fields can be moved to standard territory attributes or external lookups.
Be very careful with retention policy setup if you’re in a regulated industry. We had to keep 7 years of territory assignment history for audit purposes. Instead of deleting, we implemented a tiered storage approach - active territories stay in Zendesk Sell, archived territories get exported monthly to secure cloud storage with read-only access for reporting. Document your retention decisions thoroughly.
Thanks for the input. Our compliance team confirmed we need 5 years of territory history accessible. The tiered storage idea makes sense. How do you handle the historical reporting integration after data is archived? Our executive dashboards pull territory performance metrics going back multiple years.
For historical reporting integration, we built a unified view layer that queries both Zendesk Sell (active data) and our archive database (historical data). The BI tool joins them transparently using territory IDs as the key. Users don’t even know data is split across systems. The archive queries are slower but acceptable for historical analysis. We also pre-aggregate common metrics monthly to speed up executive dashboards. This approach solved our storage problem while maintaining full reporting capability.
Quick win for immediate relief - check if you have any test or duplicate territories from migration or training. We found 15% of our client’s custom objects were orphaned test data. Also review your custom object relationships - sometimes circular references cause storage bloat. Run the data quality report in admin settings to identify cleanup candidates.
For API-based data export, you’ll want to use the Bulk Export API with custom object filtering. I’ve successfully archived territory data older than 18 months by exporting to our data warehouse and then purging from Zendesk Sell. The key is maintaining referential integrity - make sure you export related records together. We built a Python script that batches exports by date ranges and validates the data before deletion. Storage dropped by 40% after our first cleanup cycle.