Salesforce CRM Basics - 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 standard 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.

In Salesforce, the companies that you’ve sold to are Business Accounts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

1. From Setup, enter Social Accounts and Contacts Settings in the Quick Find box, then select 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.

To configure and use the feature, complete the following steps.

1. From your personal settings, enter Social Accounts and Contacts in the Quick Find box, then select My Social Accounts and Contacts, My Social Accounts and Contacts Settings, or Settings—whichever one appears.
2. Set up Social Accounts and Contacts so that it works the way you want it to.
3. 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, and Data.com to gather up-to-date information. Make it a policy that all updated data is entered into Salesforce.

Out of the box (so to speak), Salesforce.com is a B2B product. But what if your company provides home healthcare services or lawn care services or any other type of service for individual consumers. You don't hear alot of talk about it but Salesforce.com can be tweaked for this scenario using "Person Accounts".

By default, Person Accounts are not enabled. You'll need to call support to have them enabled and they will repeatedly ask you if you really want to do this and if you understand the consequences. Once enabled, Person Accounts cannot be disabled. I would recommended you enable a Developer Edition first and test out your solution there before enabling your Production Org.

So what actually happens when you enable Person Accounts and what are the consequences? The Salesforce.com Help has alot of good info on Person Accounts but I wanted to dig in and really see what was happening in the background. In most situations, you can use person accounts as if they were contacts. You can include them in all contact list views except the Recent Contacts list on the contacts home page.

So when Person Accounts are enabled you'll see a new set of menu items under Setup -> App Setup -> Customize -> Accounts

You can configure Person Account page layout like you would any other type of page layout. You'll need to go and assign the new record type to each of the profiles that need access to it.

Once you've done they you will be able to create accounts for Business and Personal record types. When you click the "New" Account button you'll receive a picklist asking you which type to create:

So what happens when you create a new Person Account. So a Person Account is a combination of both an Account and Contact record. When Person Accounts are enabled, the following fields are added to the Account object:

• FirstName
• LastName
• IsPesonAccount
• Languagespc
• Levelpc
• PersonAssistantName
• PersonAssistantPhone
• PersonBirthdate
• PersonContactId
• PersonDepartment
• PersonEmail
• PersonEmailBouncedDate
• PersonEmailBouncedReason
• PersonHomePhone
• PersonLastCURequestDate
• PersonLastCUUpdateDate
• PersonLeadSource
• PersonMailingCity
• PersonMailingCountry
• PersonMailingPostalCode
• PersonMailingState
• PersonMailingStreet
• PersonMobilePhone
• PersonOtherCity
• PersonOtherCountry
• PersonOtherPhone
• PersonOtherPostalCode
• PersonOtherState
• PersonOtherStreet
• PersonTitle
• RecordTypeId
• Salutation

The following fields are not available for Person Accounts:

• Parent Account
• View Hierarchy
• Reports To

You can go to the Person Account page layout and add these fields to the page layout. However, you cannot add the Contacts related list to the page layout. The Partner related list is available though so you can related Person Accounts to one another..

So when you create a new Person Account records, Salesforce.com creates not only a Account record but a Contact record in the background. You cannot access the account record directly (it always relocates you back to the Account record) but it is needed for the functionality that requires a contact (emails, customer portal, etc.). Here's what the records look like from SOQL:

Account

Contact

Some other things to take into consideration for Person Accounts include:

• Person Accounts can be associated with activities using either the Name or Related To fields.
• Person Accounts can be invited to group events and requested meetings.
• Person Accounts can be added to campaigns and have a Campaign History related list.
• For cases, Person Accounts can be entered in the Account Name field, the Contact Name field, or both.
• You can add Person Accounts to the Contact Roles related list on cases, contracts, and opportunities.
• Custom objects with relationships to either accounts or contacts can be added as related lists on Person Accounts.
• Person Accounts can be enabled as users for your Customer and Self-service portals.
• Person Accounts are currently supported in Connect Offline and Connect for Outlook version 3.2 and later. They are not currently supported in Connect for Lotus Notes.
• You can send individual emails and mass emails to Person Accounts.
• For field history, Account fields for Person Accounts can be tracked using the account field history settings, but contact fields for Person Accounts are configured on the contact field history settings page.
• Person Accounts have an unique import wizard so make sure you check the Salesforce.com Help for more info.
• Leads with a blank Company field are converted to Person Accounts. The default Person Account record type for your profile is applied to the new Person Account.
• You cannot add a contact formula field that references the account object to Person Accounts page layouts.
• Contact sharing is not available if you have enabled Person Accounts. The organization-wide default for contacts is set to Controlled by Parent and is not editable.
• If your organization has customized your contact sharing settings and you want to enable Person Accounts, change your organization-wide default for contacts to Controlled by Parent, which removes all your contact sharing rules and manually shared contacts.
• Person Accounts count against both account and contact storage because the API considers each Person Account to consist of one account as well as one contact.
• Creating or editing a Person Account triggers account workflow rules.

For more details on Person Accounts, check out the Tip sheet: Tips & Hints for Person Accounts and the Salesforce.com Help in general.

By understanding the relationships between contacts, accounts, and your internal team of sales reps, you’re able to close deals more effectively and efficiently.

There are three specific types of relationships, each which offers a different view into the complexities of business relationships. Contacts to Multiple Accounts lets you relate a contact to more than one account so you can track the relationships between people and the companies they work with. See who has an indirect relationship with ABC Genius and might be able to help move the deal forward. Plus, add roles to direct and indirect contacts so you know who’s your best bet. Account Hierarchy lets you see what companies ABC Genius is affiliated with. Perhaps they have a parent company that you’ve already done business with. Finally, Account Teams tells you which sales reps are working on the ABC Genius deal so you can better coordinate with your internal team.

Your contacts might work with more than one company. A business owner might own more than one company or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple organizations. Your relationships may be complicated, but keeping tabs on them doesn’t need to be.

When you relate a single contact to multiple accounts you can easily track the relationships between people and businesses without creating duplicate records. The relationship rules are still simple. Every contact needs to be associated with a primary account. This is the account that appears in Account Name and is usually the company the contact is most closely associated with. Any other accounts associated with the contact represent indirect relationships. The Related Contacts list lets you view current and past relationships, and capture unique and custom details about these relationships so you always know who you’re talking to—or who you should be talking to.

Setting up Contacts to Multiple Accounts is quick and easy. Just follow these steps.

1. From Setup, enter Account Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Account Settings.
2. Select Allow users to relate a contact to multiple accounts.
3. Add the Related Contacts related list to the account page layouts your reps use.
   1. From Setup, enter Accounts in the Quick Find box, then select Page Layouts.
   2. Next to the appropriate page layout, click Edit.
   3. Select Related Lists.
   4. Drag Related Contacts onto the page layout. Because the Related Contacts related list automatically includes all direct contacts, you can remove the Contacts related list on your account page layouts.
   5. Click Save.
4. Add the Related Accounts related list to the contact page layouts your reps use. It’s similar to what you just did in step 3.
5. Decide whether you want to prevent activities from automatically rolling up to a contact’s primary account. If so, from Setup, go to the Activities Settings page and deselect Roll up activities to a contact's primary account.
6. If you want to look at the relationships between contacts and accounts, create custom report types.

Easily see who’s a direct contact for the account when you add the Direct field to the Related Contacts related list.

Creating relationships between Contacts and Accounts.

1. From an account record, use the Related Contacts related list to create or edit relationships between accounts and contacts. Create a relationship by clicking Add Relationship. Edit an existing relationship by clicking Edit Rel(in Salesforce Classic) or Edit Relationship (in Lightning Experience).
2. Fill in the information on the account contact relationship information.
3. Save your changes.

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.

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.