Understanding Account and Contact Relationships

Three Key Account and Contact Relationships

You’re preparing to meet with Alan and Leung from ABC Genius Tech Consulting. You’ve done your research in reviewing their company’s past history with Cloud Kicks. Now you need to build up some business relationships.

Strong relationships can help you build and maintain success as you work with ABC Genius. There are three particular types of relationships to consider. Which of your employees work with the account? How is it related to other accounts? And what roles will Alan and Leung serve in your deal?

Contact Roles

You know you’re meeting with Alan and Leung, but you don’t know a whole lot about them. If they’ve been assigned Contact Roles, you can tell at a glance which role they play in the organization. The Contact Role is separate from each contact’s job title, which might not tell you much about what part a contact plays in consumer decisions.

Contact Roles lets you indicate a contact’s role in deciding to buy your products or services, regardless of their job title. When you know which role each contact plays, you’ll have a better idea how to work with them.

Alan and Leung are both managers in different departments but Leung’s role is to make the final buying decision, while Alan’s role is to give an opinion. The best roles for them are Decision Maker and Influencer. Both these roles are set up by default in Salesforce. You can also use the Contact Roles related list to note that Leung is the primary contact person for this account.

The Contact Roles list doesn’t appear on the Contact page until it’s added by an administrator. Let’s add the Contact Roles related list now, and then add Leung and Alan’s roles.

Add Contact Roles for Accounts

1. From Setup, click Customize | Accounts | Contact Role.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the name and one or more new roles.
4. Click Save.

You can edit the names of existing contact roles or delete existing contact roles in the same location. Any edits you make will be passed along to contacts that are currently assigned to that role. For example, if you decide that “Evaluator” isn’t specific enough, you can rename the role to “Product Evaluator”. All contacts were assigned to the “Evaluator” contact role on accounts will now have the “Product Evaluator” role.

Make the Contact Role Related List Visible on Accounts

1. From Setup, click Customize | Accounts | Page Layouts.
2. Next to the page layout to which you want to add Contact roles, click Edit.
3. Select Related Lists.
4. Drag Contact Roles below the Contacts related list.
5. Click Save.

   Add a Role for a Contact

   1. In the Contact Roles related list of an account, click New .
   2. Click the lookup icon to select a contact or person account. Optionally, click New to create a contact.
   3. Choose a role. If you don’t select a role or the role is set to None, any changes you make to the record aren’t saved.
   4. Optionally, select Primary to set the contact as primary for the account.
   5. Click Save.

   Account Hierarchies

   Alan and Leung work at the ABC Genius Tech Consulting corporate office in Boulder, but you noticed that when you searched for ABC Genius that you have several other accounts with similar names: ABC Genius Tech Consulting East, ABC Genius Tech Consulting West, and ABC Genius Tech Consulting Canada. In the ABC Genius Tech Consulting West account record, ABC Genius Tech Consulting is listed as the Parent Account.

   How are all these companies related? Are you going to have to dig through every single record to find out? That could take a lot of time!

   If you’ve recorded the Parent Account for each account that has one, Salesforce can generate a family tree for your account. The hierarchy shows this relationship for the ABC Genius Tech accounts.To view an account’s hierarchy, click on the Accounts tab and select an account. Click the View Hierarchy link next to the Account Name field.

   Best Practices for Establishing Account Hierarchies

   You have two basic choices when you’re deciding how to establish accounts for businesses with multiple locations.

   Global Enterprise Account

   You could establish one global account and link all contacts, opportunities, cases, and so on to that single overarching account. Using one global account makes it easy to find that account’s records and to report on that account at the enterprise level. But it’s harder to manage a large mass of information, and not being able to easily view the big picture might make it hard to see what each location needs from you for your relationship to be successful.

   Location-Specific Accounts

   Establish accounts for each location and create contacts, opportunities, cases and so on separately for each location. With this option, you maintain more accounts and need to set up a few more complex reports to get the big picture. But using multiple accounts means you can take advantage of account ownership, hierarchies, specific sharing settings, and more granular reporting. You can also more easily track and report on opportunities, cases, and other interactions for each account.

   We recommend establishing accounts for each separate location, rather than squeezing all locations into a single global account. This arrangement lets you concentrate on customer success in each location while still giving you the ability to put the big picture together.

   Account Teams

   Unless your company is teeny tiny, it’s likely that more than one person works with each account. For example, the team of employees for an account might include a sales rep, sales manager, support agent, support manager, and marketing personnel.

   A Salesforce Account Team can contain up to five people, each of whom can be assigned different roles and different levels of access to the account and its opportunities and cases. Like Contact Roles, Account Teams isn’t set up automatically. An administrator must turn it on and set up the roles that each team member can be assigned.

   Enable Account Teams

   1. From Setup, click Customize | Accounts | Account Teams.
   2. Click Enable Account Teams.
   3. Select Account Teams Enabled and click Save.
   4. Select the account page layouts on which to include the new Account Team related list and click Save. Optionally, you can also select Add to users’ customized related lists to add the Account Team related list for users who have changed their personal settings for Account record pages.
   5. Optionally, click Team Roles to review or edit team roles.

   Assign an Account Team

   1. On the Accounts tab, select an account to view and scroll down.
   2. On the Account Team related list, click Add.
   3. Click the search icon to select a Salesforce user to assign to the team. If you haven’t set up any other users, the only person that you can assign to the team is yourself.
   4. For each team member, select a level of access to the account and to opportunities and cases related to the account.
   5. For each team member, select the team member’s role.
   6. Click Save.

   After you add an account team, the button Add Default Team displays right next to Add button. Default Teams is a shortcut that saves you from having to enter the same members into the same form over and over again. If the same people usually work together, create a default account team and assign them to it. You can even set Salesforce to add your default account team every time and eliminate the need to click buttons at all. Visit Setting Up Default Account Teams to find out how.

Accounts & Contacts In Salesforce

Accounts and Contacts

You need insight into your business and your data and that starts with the people you're doing business with. In Salesforce, you store information about your customers using accounts and contacts. Accounts are companies that you're doing business with, and contacts are the people who work for them.

If you’re doing business with a single person, like a solo contractor or an individual consumer you use a special account type called a Person Account.

For the purposes of this module, we’ll assume you’re selling to businesses only, and your accounts are all business accounts. But almost everything you learn here can be applied to both types of accounts.

Accounts and contacts are related to many other standards objects, which makes them some of the most important objects in Salesforce. Understanding how to use accounts and contacts is key to getting the most out of Salesforce CRM.

Business Accounts

You’re on your way to a meeting with a customer, ABC Genius Tech Consulting. They're a head corporate office of a national company, and you think they’ll love the latest Cloud Kicks sneakers design. You need to brush up on their needs and buying history, and you want to wow them by knowing who’s who at ABC. You can find the information you need in Salesforce.

In Salesforce, the companies that you’ve sold to are Business Accounts. To prep for your meeting, you start by going to the Accounts tab and finding the listing for ABC Genius Tech Consulting. Click the account name to view details about the account.

When you open the account record, you see the information collected on the company as a list of records related to it, such people who work there, deals in the works, service requests, uploaded documents, and more.

To prepare for your meeting, you can review the details about the ABC Genius Tech Consulting company and click on anything listed in its related lists. For example, you see that ABC Genius Tech Consulting filed a service case about two months ago. Click the case to learn more about the problem they had with their order.

If you’re on the road without your computer, you can view most of the same account information using the Salesforce1 mobile app. In Salesforce1, tap Account, search for ABC, and tap ABC Genius Tech Consulting.

Let’s create an account for ABC Genius Tech Consulting in Salesforce.

1. Click the Accounts tab.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the account’s name.
4. Enter all the information you’ve got about ABC Genius Tech Consulting.
5. Click Save.

Business Contacts

One of the most important things you need to know about a company is who works there and how to reach them. In Salesforce, the people who work at your accounts are called Contacts. Each account has at least one contact person, and each contact is related to an account.

Your contacts at ABC Genius Tech Consulting are Alan Johnson and Leung Chan. In Salesforce, you have a contact record for Alan, listing his employer (Account), email address, and phone number. You’d have a second contact record for Leung, listing her employer (Account), email address, and phone number.

Because Alan and Leung already have records in Salesforce, you’d find them by clicking the Contacts tab and locating them in the Recent Contacts list, or selecting a view and clicking Go. And because both Alan and Leung are contacts for the account ABC Genius Tech Consulting, you’d find them both listed below that account’s record details. Click Leung or Alan’s name to view the full contact record.

Like an account record, a contact record can have its own related lists of information, such as cases that each contact has filed, meetings you’ve had, or logs of calls to that contact.

Let’s add Alan Johnson and Leung Chan as contacts.

1. Click the Accounts tab.
2. Click the ABC Genius account.
3. Scroll down to find the Contacts related list, and click New to create a contact.
4. Add all the information you have about the contact. You’re required to add at least the contact’s last name and to select the name of the account where the contact works.
5. Click Save.

Selling to Individual Customers: Person Accounts

Notice that when we discussed Accounts above, we specifically discussed Business Accounts, which are optimized for selling to companies or other organizations.

If you have customers who are individuals, not companies, your Salesforce organization can be set up to use Person Accounts.

Person Accounts let you store information that applies to human beings rather than corporations, such as a first name and a last name.

Person and business account have a few important differences.

• Person accounts are forever. After they're turned on, you can't turn them off.
• If your organization uses both business accounts and person accounts, you’ll have to select which type of account you’re creating whenever you add an account.
• Person accounts can’t have contacts.
• Person accounts don’t have an account hierarchy.
• You can associate person accounts with social network profiles in the Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature.
• You can’t get account news for person accounts.
• You can’t use contact roles with person accounts.

Keeping Up with Your Accounts

Before you head to your meeting, you might take a few minutes to find out the latest news about your account or the people who work there. You could do this by opening up a web browser and running multiple searches to find out what’s going on with ABC Genius Tech Consulting, or the technology industry, or reviewing social network profiles for Alan and Leung, if you can find them. Your search might even show you what they’ve been doing on Twitter or Facebook lately.

Or, you can check all of that from within Salesforce.

Social Accounts and Contacts

The Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature adds social network information from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Klout to your records. To use it, you must have an account on each social network that you’re using, and you have to link the account or contact record to a user profile on each social network.

After you’ve set that up, the social network information for the contact or account is available on the account record or contact record on the full Salesforce site. On Salesforce1, you can view social network information for Twitter users only.

You can’t see anything about an account or contact that wouldn’t normally be available to you when you’re logged in to the social network. But you can see that information at a glance and easily switch between networks. If you connect a Facebook or Twitter profile for an account, contact, or lead, you can use the social network profile image as the profile image for that account, contact, or lead in Salesforce.

Before you can use the Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature, your admin must enable it for your organization and you have to configure your personal settings.

Enable Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads

In the organization you’re using for this module, enable the feature.

1. From Setup, click Customize | Social Apps Integration | Social Accounts and Contacts | Settings.
2. Select Enable Social Accounts and Contacts.
3. Select the social networks that your organization can use. By default, all social networks are selected.
4. Click Save.
5. Let your users know that they can configure Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads for their individual use.

Configure Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads

1. At the top of any page on the full Salesforce site, click the down arrow next to your name. From the menu under your name, select Setup or My Settings—whichever one appears.
2. From the left pane, select one of the following:
   • If you clicked Setup in step 1, select My Social Accounts and Contacts | Settings.
   • If you clicked My Settings in step 1, select Display & Layout | My Social Accounts and Contacts.
3. Set up Social Accounts and Contacts so that it works the way you want it to.
4. Click Save.

Best Practices for Managing Accounts and Contacts

Establish naming conventions for accounts

If you don’t already have standards for account names, now is a great time to establish some. It’s important to consider how best to record an account’s name, and how you can use naming to denote relationships between accounts. For example, if you work with multiple franchises, you might need to use names that make sense in a hierarchy but also help you differentiate between two stores with the same name in a similar geographic area.

Don’t allow orphan contacts

Always associate contacts with an account. Contacts without accounts—private contacts—are like a forgotten boat adrift at sea. They’re hidden from all users except their owner and system administrators, which makes them easy to forget, hard to find, and useless to colleagues.

Audit your accounts and contacts

Use exception reporting in Salesforce to find accounts and contacts without activities in the last 30, 60, or 90 days.

Or create an “inactive” checkbox field on your account and contact objects, and use mass update to denote inactive accounts. Set up an automated process to mark accounts and contacts inactive for you, based on criteria you specify.

Handle inactive accounts and contacts

After you’ve located inactive accounts and contacts, you can handle them in many different ways. For example,

• Organize an outreach campaign to re-engage with them.
• Exclude them from list views, reports, automated processes, campaigns, and more so you can focus marketing, sales, and service efforts on active customers .

Maintain active ownership

It’s hard to actively manage an account if it’s assigned to someone who isn’t using Salesforce. When an employee moves to a different position or leaves your company, assign that person’s accounts and contacts to new owners.

Keep your records updated

Use features like Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads; Stay-in-Touch requests; and Data.com to gather up-to-date information. Make it a policy that all updated data is entered into Salesforce.