Chapter 8
Using Accounts
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the account record
Using the account related lists
Keeping your accounts up to date
Who are your customers? What do you know about them? What are their top compelling business problems? If you have trouble answering any of these questions, pay close attention to this chapter. Here, we discuss how to use Salesforce to manage your accounts.
In Salesforce, an account is a company that you do business with or have done business with in the past. Accounts can include all types of companies — customers, prospects, partners, and even competitors. Among the top reasons why companies implement any customer relationship management (CRM) tool is that they need a centralized place where they can store account data, to prevent themselves from searching all over the place for critical customer information. With Salesforce, you can keep all your important account information in one place so that you and your team can apply that knowledge to sell more and keep customers happy. For example, if you work for a pharmaceutical company, you can use the accounts area to manage your territory of hospitals, clinics, and top offices and capture everything from call reports to business plans.
In this chapter, we describe all the ways you can use accounts to manage and track companies. First, you need to get your important company lists into Salesforce and organize them according to the way that you work. Then, you can find out how to make the best use of the account record to profile your companies. Finally, you can discover how to capitalize on the account-related lists to gain a 360-degree view of your customers and ensure that no one drops any balls.
Getting Familiar with the Account Record
You use an account record to collect all the critical information about the companies with which you interact. That account record is supported by other records (contacts, opportunities, cases, activities, and so on) that collectively give you a complete view of your customer. From this vantage point, you can quickly take in the view from the top, but you can also easily drill down into the details.
Here’s a short list of valuable things you can do with accounts:
- Import and consolidate your lists of target accounts in one place.
- Enter new accounts quickly and maintain naming consistency.
- Create parent/child relationships that describe how companies’ divisions or subsidiaries relate to each other.
- Realign sales territories.
- Segment your markets with ease.
- Eliminate paper-based business planning.
- Assign account teams to better serve your customers.
- Track your top customers and deemphasize nonstrategic ones.
- Define the movers and shakers within an account.
- Monitor information from your account’s social network.
- Manage your channel partners.
Understanding standard account fields
An account record comprises fields that make up the information on a company that you’re tracking. A record has two modes:
- Edit: You can modify fields.
- Saved: You can view the fields and the account’s related lists, which are located below the record fields.
An account record also comes preconfigured with a set of fields commonly used for account management. Most of the standard fields are self-explanatory, but in the following list, we highlight certain terms that warrant greater definition:
- Account Owner: This required field identifies the person in your organization who owns the account. An account record has only one owner, but many users can still collaborate on an account.
- Account Name: This required field represents the name of the company you want to track.
- Account Site: The Account Site field goes hand in hand with the Account Name field when you’re distinguishing different physical locations or divisions of a company. This field, although not required, is very important if your company sells to different locations of a customer with decentralized buying patterns. For example, if you sell mattresses to HappyDaze Hotels but each HappyDaze hotel buys independently, this field is useful for classifying different sites.
- Type: This is one of the fields on an account record that classifies the relationship of an account to your company. The Type field consists of a drop-down list of values, which can prove critical if you want to differentiate types of companies. For example, if you work for a software company that uses value-added resellers (VARs) to sell and service your products, you may want to select Reseller as one of your drop-down list values.
- Rating: Use this drop-down list to define your internal rating system for companies that you’re tracking. Salesforce provides default values of Hot, Warm, and Cold, but you can replace these with numbers, letters, or other terms based on how you want to segment companies.
See Chapter 17 for instructions on customizing account fields, such as the Type and Rating picklists.
Building parent/child relationships
If you sell into different locations or divisions of a company and you’re currently challenged by how to keep this information organized, use account hierarchies to solve your problem. In Salesforce, you can link multiple offices of a company together by using the Parent Account field on an account record. And you can create multiple tiers to the hierarchy if your customer is organized that way.
To establish parent/child relationships, follow these steps:
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Create accounts for the parent and subsidiary companies.
If you need help with this step, turn to Chapter 5 for information on how to create new records.
You can skip this step if the accounts are already created. However, you may want to type a term such as Headquarters or HQ in the Account Site field to signify which account is the parent. -
Click the link in your Recent Items list in the left sidebar for the subsidiary account (a child account) that you want to link and then click Edit.
If it’s not in the Recent Items list, search and find the child account you want to link and click Edit.
The record appears in Edit mode.
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To the right of the Parent Account field, click the Lookup icon.
A pop-up window appears, containing a Search field and a list of recently viewed accounts.
If you see the parent account in the most-recently viewed results list, skip to Step 5. - Search for the parent account by typing the name of the account in the Search field and then clicking Go.
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From the list of results, click the name of the company to select the parent account (as shown in Figure 8-1).
The pop-up window closes, and your selection appears in the Parent Account field.
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(Optional) To further denote the child account, use the Account Site field.
Some companies use city, state, country, division, and so on, depending on how they organize their accounts. For example, if Big Box Office Supplies, Inc., has locations in Dallas and Atlanta, you could type the city into the Account Site field for each child account so that you can tell which is which.
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Click Save.
The child Account detail page appears.
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To view the account hierarchy, click the View Hierarchy link to the right of the Account Name field on the child account record.
An Account Hierarchy list page appears, and like other lists, you can click an item to go to a specific account.
FIGURE 8-1: Select a sample parent account.
Performing Actions with Account Related Lists
Fields on an account record are useful for storing important data specific to a company. But where do you go to capture all the critical interactions and relationships when you’re working an account? To keep track of these details, use the related lists located on the Account detail page.
Many of the actions on account related lists are common to other modules. For example, major modules, such as Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Cases, all have related lists for Open Activities, Activity History, and Notes & Attachments. Instead of being redundant, we point you to Chapter 5 for details on using related lists to track tasks and calendar events. In the following sections, we describe certain related lists that are unique to the account record.
Defining contact roles
Many sales reps do a great job of collecting business cards for contacts within an account, but this action alone doesn’t get them closer to a sale. Contacts and their titles often don’t tell the whole story about decision makers and the chain of command within an account. To use contact roles in Salesforce, your administrator must proactively reveal this related list on the account record — you can find details on how to do this in Chapter 17.
To better define the buying influences on an account, go to an account record and follow these steps:
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Review your records in the Contact related list.
If important contacts are missing, add them first, which we describe in Chapter 9.
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Click the New button on the Contact Roles related list.
The Account Contact Role Edit page appears.
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Type the name of a contact in the Contact field and then click the Lookup icon.
A pop-up window with your search results appears.
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Find the correct contact:
- The contact is part of the search results. Click the link for that contact’s name.
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Your search doesn’t find the contact. Refine your search, or click the New button to create the contact record and then select the contact you find or create.
This is only true if “Quick Create” is enabled for your organization.
After you select the contact, the pop-up window disappears, and the Contact field is filled in.
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Select the Correct Role from the Role drop-down list.
The default roles are strategic, rather than mere job titles. If the right role for your contact doesn’t appear, advise your system administrator to edit the roles. Many companies match these roles with their particular sales methodology identifiers.
- Select the Primary Contact check box if the contact is your primary contact; then click the Save button or the Save & New button:
- Save: The Account detail page reappears, and your contact appears on the Contact Roles related list for that account’s record.
- Save & New: A new Account Contact Role Edit page appears, and you can associate another contact to a role immediately.
Displaying an account’s opportunities
Over the course of managing an account, you’ll hopefully uncover specific opportunities to sell that company your products or services. You can use the Opportunity related list to quickly perform the following tasks:
- Stay aware of all open opportunities that you and your team are pursuing on an account.
- Add new opportunities and link them automatically to the account.
- Edit and delete opportunity records with a single click.
- Gauge the progress of an account by quickly seeing all open and closed opportunities at their various sales stages and amounts.
See Chapter 10 for the scoop on managing opportunities.
Viewing cases
Account health is much more than measuring the growth of sales for a customer. After selling, sales reps want to stay informed of customer service issues so that they can continue to keep their customers satisfied, resolve issues early, receive warnings about potential landmines, and track potential upsell opportunities. Use the Cases related list to view all the open and closed customer service cases that relate to an account.
If your company relies on a channel sales team to manage partners, distribute leads, and bring in revenue, consider using Salesforce Communities, which is available in Enterprise and Performance editions for an extra charge. This partner relationship management (PRM) application gets your partners on board with using Salesforce to manage all the details of their activities with your company and your joint deals. Go to Chapter 12 for a more in-depth discussion.
Tracking your account teams
If you’re fortunate enough to work with large companies, you probably know that it takes a team of people to win complex deals and maintain large accounts. The Account Owner field may identify the primary person in charge, but often you need to know who to go to for a specific purpose, or maybe the account owner is just out sick. Account teams lets you list all the individuals at your company who work with an account and detail their specific roles.
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Choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Account Teams.
The Account Team Setup page appears.
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Click Enable Account Teams, select the Account Teams Enabled check box (as shown in Figure 8-2), and then click Save.
The Page Layout Selection page appears, allowing you to select all the Account page layouts to which you want to add the Account Teams related list. If you have account types (and layouts) that never require team collaboration, don’t add the related list to these.
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Select the account page layouts to which you want to add the Account Teams related list and click Save.
The Account Team Setup page appears, where you can choose to define team roles for your organization. This step is optional.
FIGURE 8-2: Enabling Account Teams.
Now that Account Teams are enabled for your organization, to give credit to your team and make sure that others know whom to call, go to an account record and follow these steps:
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Scroll down to the Account Team related list or click the Account Team hover link at the top of the page.
If you don’t see the Account Team related list, have your administrator activate the feature in Setup.
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Click the Add button to add up to five team members.
The New Account Team Members page appears, as shown in Figure 8-3.
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Use the Team Member lookups to select fellow users of Salesforce who work on this account.
You can always go back and add more later.
- (Optional) Specify the sharing access you want to give for this account, its opportunities, and its cases.
- Select the appropriate role in the Team Role drop-down list.
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Click Save.
You’re returned to the account record’s detail page with your account team listed.
FIGURE 8-3: Add account team members.
Maintaining Your Account Database
The more you use Salesforce for account management, the more important it is to maintain it over time.
In the following sections, we show you simple tools for keeping your account database up to date.
Increasing account accuracy with Data.com
Everyone has his or her own way of entering a company name, but when each sales rep uses his own method, it leads to duplicate account records. Instead of arguing over whose method is best, you can use Data.com to provide you with the correct name.
Data.com provides top-quality data from Dun & Bradstreet and is available in Salesforce for an added charge. You can use it to automatically clean your account records, providing you with up-to-date information for 83 account fields. Sales reps can also use Data.com to instantly import new accounts and contacts into Salesforce. Whether you’re augmenting your existing data or starting from scratch, Data.com can provide the data you need without ever having to leave Salesforce.
Deleting account records
If you (or a subordinate) own accounts that need to be deleted, you can delete them one at a time by using the Delete button on the account records. The one caveat here is that some companies remove your permission to delete accounts altogether. If this is the case or if you want to delete many accounts at one time, consult with your system administrator. System administrators are the only users in your company who have the ability to mass-delete records. (Kind of startling to realize that geeks have all the power, isn’t it?)
When deleting account records, remember that you’re also deleting associated records. So, if you’re deleting an account, you can potentially be removing contacts, activities, opportunities, and other records linked to the account. You can rectify a mistakenly deleted record within 15 days of your deletion by retrieving it from your Recycle Bin, but be careful before deleting records.