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.