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.