Accounts vs Contacts in Salesforce.com

The ancient argument about Contact level versus Account comes from the earliest days of my experience with Salesforce, back when I was a lowly Business Analyst masquerading as a Salesforce Admin. The sales and marketing department didn’t utilize the Account level for anything and had moved away from using Leads as the entry point to qualification. Every prospect was imported as a Contact inside a shell account and an Account Type field was created to measure their movement along the sales cycle. The sales folk wanted every field in the world added to the Contact record in Salesforce and they wanted it for three reasons:

• They were used to that from the SalesLogix system they had bastardized into brokenness


• They didn’t understand, nor care to understand, the powerful leverage that can be gained from compartmentalization through object orientation in a database (especially one as scalable as Salesforce was, even at the time)


• They were lazy as shit

Now the first two can be fixed with education, the third with a kick in the ass from Executive leadership. Because here’s the thing about hunting (all sales energy exerted is an action of hunting), the best hunters scout and track their prey from higher ground. In Salesforce, there is no higher ground than the Account object. All activity for each Contact, Opportunity, Asset, Contract, Campaign and Case are visible from the Account object. And to not use the Account record as the starting point for all execution on a qualified prospect, is akin to a hunter refusing to scout his target from a hilltop, instead choosing to walk down to a ravine and start looking up.

Your users should first review the activity history and attributes of the Account record first before they go down into the Contact records on any qualified prospects (I say qualified because they shouldn’t have been converted over from a Lead if they had not yet been qualified in terms of the ability and interest to purchase your product/solution).

Any time you have an attribute that will apply to all contacts at the same time (i.e. the company owns a widget with a competitor of yours), it belongs at the Account level because it’s one point of update which can then filter down to all contacts. For example, let’s say you had a CEO and a CFO you were working and you assigned competitive ownership on the CFO’s Contact level. Without configuring workflow trickery or outright custom code, this information is now unavailable on the CFO’s contact page and when you go to pull a competitive prospect list, the CEO will be excluded from the list and you could miss out on an opportunity for contact.

Don’t work against Salesforce; this is laziness and lunacy and you must not let your users fall victim to it. It’s up to you, as an intelligent Salesforce Administrator and/or Executive Sales Leadership, to understand and prevent the terrible mistake of allowing the Contact record to become the primary focal point of your sales processes.

Enforcing effective process on resisting users is like improving your golf game—sometimes you have to change your swing to lower your handicap and it’s painful up front but the results speak for themselves.

 

PHOTO: Hunting © by edbrambley