Understanding Accounts & Contacts for Sales Process

Accounts & Contact for Salesforce Classic

Define your sales process. Accounts are companies that we are doing business with. On the other hand, Contacts represent the individual, point of contact who work for those companies.

Salesforce has two Account types:

1. Business Account:

Stores company/organization information with whom we are selling our products/services.
Is used in B2B use cases.
It usually has a contact related to it who becomes the go-to point of contact for communication.
It requires no additional feature to be enabled. It is present in our org by default.

Don't forget to check out: 10 Distinctive Salesforce Features To Make Your Tasks Easy

2. Person Account:

It stores individual information as an account.
It is used in B2C use cases where business is being conducted by a single person representative.
It does not have a contact associated with the account since it is direct communication with the stakeholder who is holding the account.

Relationship Between Accounts and Contacts

There are three specific types of account-contact relationships, each of which offers a different view depending on the complexities of business requirements.

Contacts to Multiple Accounts: People often work with more than 1 company, for example, a business owner might be owning multiple companies, or a consultant might be working on behalf of multiple organizations. This is a typical scenario where we will use this feature to relate a contact to more than one account.We can also define the role a contact has in an account. For example, Mr X is the contact in Salesforce for the Account XYZ company. He is also having a role as a decision-maker for PQR Company and the role of Evaluator for ABC Company. Defining roles helps Sales reps to engage with the right point of contact and work on deals faster.
- To enable this feature go to Setup -> type Account settings in quick find -> and click on Account Settings -> enable the checkbox -> and select the option for what we want to do with the contacts related to multiple accounts on the deletion and replacing the direct accounts to a contact associated with multiple accounts.

Check out another amazing blog by Narendra here: Step by Step Guide for Salesforce Knowledge Implementation

Account Hierarchy: Account hierarchy allows users to see all accounts related to a parent account in a hierarchical tree-like structure.

- For example, if we have S accounts and each relates to the same account via the Parent Account field, we can view this as a tree structure with the Parent account at the top and its subsidiary accounts below it.
Account Teams: It so happens that not one Salesforce user will work on an account. It would most likely consist of users with varied access to the account who work together. In such a scenario, we can enable Account Teams.
- To enable Account teams to search for Account Teams in the quick find -> and then Enable Account Team checkbox -> define the Roles via picklist under Team Roles-> and then add the Account Team related list to the Account record page -> Click on Add Team Members -> select the users and define the role and the relevant access that the team member will have.