Partner Teams
A partner team is a group of individuals or companies involved in a specific sales project, or even in a single transaction within a project.
Teams are used in opportunities, where they are known as “buying centers”. They support sales methodology by giving you a way to keep track of people who may influence your potential customer's decisions about buying goods or services.
You can create buying centers in the Contacts assignment block in opportunities, and in accounts. You can do the following:
Enter the team members, such as contact people on your customer's side.
Assign characteristics, such as Technical Knowledge or Influence on the Budget to these people.
Record relationships between them, such as X Influences Y.
You can display and change relationships in a graphical view.
Assign characteristics and ratings to the relationships themselves, such as X influences Y strongly, somewhat or not at all.
Choose predefined notes, such as Information is missing, to further describe team members.
Structure
Customizing for partner teams consists of settings for characteristics, ratings, relationships, and notes. With these settings you control what entries are available in transactions. For example, if your Customizing settings include the characteristic Technical Knowledge, this characteristic is then available to users creating transactions.
To organize characteristics, you assign them to characteristics groups. You can then mark one of these groups as general, and assign the other groups, not marked as general, to specific relationships or partner functions:
Characteristics in the general group are available in transactions to describe partners in all partner functions.
Characteristics in groups assigned to specific relationships or functions are only available for those relationships or partners in those functions.
You make settings for partner teams in Customizing for Customer
Relationship Management, by choosing 
Basic
Functions 
Partner Processing
Partner Teams 
.
You assign characteristics groups to partner functions in Customizing
for Customer Relationship Management, by choosing Basic Functions Partner Processing
Define Partner Determination Procedure .
Example
In Customizing you do the following:
Create a new characteristics group that contains the characteristics Technical Knowledge and Influence on the Budget.
Define the ratings a lot, some and none for both of these characteristics.
Assign this group to the partner function contact person.
Define the note Information is missing.
A business user creates an opportunity and:
Enters a partner as the contact person in the Contacts assignment block.
Knows this partner has good technical knowledge, and therefore selects this characteristic and the rating a lot.
Does not know, however, if this contact person has influence on the budget, so does not select this characteristic.
Because he needs more information about this partner, he selects the note Information is missing.
The data entered is now available to this user and his colleagues any time they open this opportunity, and can help them plan sales strategy.