Business Development with Accounts and Contacts

Accounts and contacts are the foundation of approaching a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Accounts are typically organizations that you already do business with or organizations that contain opportunities that have been converted from leads and are in the sales cycle. Contacts are people within these organizations that you have already contacted for various purposes, such as sales, marketing, or billing.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

• What are accounts and what are they used for?
• What are contacts and what are they used for?
• What are relationships and what are they used for?

With the help of these topics, we’ll learn how to create an account and see what an account record contains. We will then do the same for contacts and contact records, and lastly, we will look at creating a relationship and what a relationship record contains.

Technical requirements

For this chapter, make sure you log in to your development org and follow along with the examples. You will need to enable Contacts to Multiple Accounts for the relationships feature to work:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/accounts_contacts_lightning_experience/understand-account-and-contact-relationships-lightning

Understanding how accounts work

Accounts are the organizations you have saved in Salesforce. These can be customers, partners, vendors, or any other company you would want to keep track of in your system.

Business use case

You are a sales rep for XYZ Widgets. There is a customer in a legacy system that you wish to add to Salesforce. Since this customer is not a new lead, you have to enter the customer directly as an account. Let’s see how this is done.

Creating an account

In this section, we will focus on accounts as customers or potential customers. There are two ways of creating accounts:

• Creating an account by converting a lead
• Creating an account by navigating to the Accounts tab

We covered creating an account by converting a lead in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads. Let’s now see how we can create an account by navigating to the Accounts tab, as well as what is contained in an account record. The following screenshot...

Understanding contacts

Contacts are the people connected to Salesforce accounts. These can be customers, partners, vendors, or any other contacts related to the accounts you want to keep track of in your system.

Business use case

You are a sales rep for XYZ Widgets. We created an account for GenePoint in the previous section. You now have to create a contact record for the person you will be directly interacting with from GenePoint.

Creating a contact

In this section, we will focus on contacts as customers or potential customers. There are two ways of creating contacts:

• By converting a lead
• By navigating to a specific account and creating a contact related to that account

We covered creating a contact by converting a lead in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads. Let’s now see how to create a contact by navigating to an account and creating one. The following screenshot shows the main navigation page in your development org, which...

Understanding relationships

Relationships are the connections between contacts and multiple accounts in Salesforce. A contact is always connected to the account (organization) that the user works for. There are some cases where these contacts are connected to other accounts in the system, such as contractors, board members, or any other role that the contact could be connected to. Let's see how this works.

A business use case

For our example here, let's assume that John Doe is the sales manager at GenePoint but also sits on the board of another one of our accounts, Cardinal Inc.. As the sales rep for XYZ Widgets, you will make the connection in Salesforce. Let's see how to go about this.

Enabling relationships

The first step is to enable the Allow users to relate a contact to multiple accounts feature. As you can see in the following screenshot, I navigated to the setup and configuration section of Salesforce:

There are several steps, which are shown in the preceding...

Summary

After finishing this chapter, we now know what an account is and how to create and view an account. We then learned what a contact is and how to create a new contact on an account record. For both the account and the contact, we learned the important sections in the records for each, including the Related Items, Details, and News sections.

Finally, we learned about when to use a relationship and how to create a relationship between a contact and an account.

In the next chapter, we will look at opportunities—the most important part of the sales cycle in Salesforce!

Questions

1. What are some use cases for the types of accounts that an organization may want to keep track of in Salesforce?
2. Why would you want to create contacts related to accounts you are doing business with?
3. When would you create a relationship from a contact to an account that the contact does not directly work for?
4. How can you enable the Relationships feature?
5. How do you remove a relationship?

Further reading

• Accounts and contacts for the Lightning experience: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/accounts_contacts_lightning_experience