Best Practices for the Salesforce Account Object

Salesforce comes with quite a few objects and fields that you and your team can use right away. You can use these to get the most out of your CRM right away. Opportunities, Leads, Cases, and, of course, Accounts are all examples of such items, as most businesses can easily use them to translate their new or current business processes into Salesforce. This post will talk about some tips and tricks to think about when using the normal Salesforce Account object.

What Is the Salesforce Account Object?

Salesforce Account Object are easy to understand compared to other things because they reflect the companies or people with whom your company will do business. Most of the time, the Account can easily cover everything else that has to do with either the sales or support process.

For instance, we know for sure that every company has employees, and in Salesforce, those workers are called “Contacts” and are linked to an “Account.” In the same way, a sale will be in the works at some point, which will be shown by an Opportunity for the Account.

1. Business Accounts vs. Individual Accounts

Whether you only sell to other businesses (B2B) or to individuals (B2C), Salesforce can handle both processes out of the box by letting you use Person Accounts along with Business Accounts.

Business Accounts: These are companies that you do business with and whose workers are listed as Contacts.
Person Accounts: Represent the specific people to whom you are selling your goods or services. Even though they don’t have related Contacts because the feature blends some Account and Contact fields into the Person Account, they can be linked to Opportunities and other items.

Before, you had to ask Salesforce Support to help you enable Person Accounts. Now, you can do it yourself by following a process in Setup. One thing to keep in mind is that at least one of the record types should be set up on Accounts. Also, you have to agree that once Person Accounts are turned on, they can’t be turned off.

Before turning on Person Accounts in the real world, you should try out the details in a Sandbox and review the paperwork and how they would work with the other features. Also Read: How to Optimize Salesforce reports and dashboards

2. Explain how new accounts are made

This could be one of the most important parts of keeping track of Account records and data quality, since Accounts can be made by different people or teams and come from different places.

Lead Conversion: If Leads are used in the organization, the lead conversion process can be used to make accounts if needed. In this case, you can use the LeadConvertSettings, which you can find by clicking on the Map Fields button, to choose which data is moved from custom fields on the Lead to custom fields on the Account.
Data import: Choose when and who can enter a large number of new Accounts at once, as well as the minimum amount of data needed to reach a certain success rate. This is easy to make happen by using validation rules or making some areas needed.
Users or Salesforce Admins can directly make accounts. It’s up to the company to decide if they should be able to do this or not, and who can add the new data.

Even if you don’t put a lot of restrictions on who can create things, you should have a detailed talk and make sure the person is able to do so. I also think you should look into similar rules and turn them on so that teams that may end up working for the same company don’t cross.

3. Know what your users need to know

When you first start using Accounts in Salesforce, you will see that there are a lot of ready-to-use fields for you to use. You can also make the custom fields that are needed to meet the business needs of your company that are related to the Account data.

In cases when consumers aren’t aware of current capability, a simple request for more fields might grow into a complex discussion involving several parties. Some teams and people should only be able to see and change certain fields and records, while others should be able to do both.

This means that, as a Salesforce Admin, you should be aware of the object limits for each object, but the conversation will likely move on to rights, sharing settings, profiles, and maybe even record types and enabling.

4. Account Team

The Account Team is made up of the people in your company who work closely together to make a certain Account successful. This could be the Sales Managers, the Customer Success Team, or even the technical teams. With this built-in feature, you can quickly link everyone who is connected in some way to the Account record.

There is, of course, more to the Account Team than meets the eye. Not only can the Default Team be set for each user, but each Account Team Member can also be given the ability to read or write records for the Account and any linked Opportunities, Contacts, or Cases.

5. The Order of Accounts

The Account Hierarchy is another useful aspect of Salesforce, especially when working with large companies that have many foreign branches. Using the standard Parent Account field, you can link one Account to another to create a group of linked companies that are easy to see in your Salesforce instance. This information can, of course, be used later for reporting and other steps or validations.

6. Contacts for more than one account

Especially in a business-to-business (B2B) setting with big purchases and projects, employee ties with some companies may not be straight lines. One example is channel sales, in which a partner helps another company make a buy or put something into place.

You can turn on the Contacts to Multiple Accounts feature in the Account settings in Setup. This will bring up the Related Contacts list, which can be added to the Account layout. No data duplication or reparenting is required when relating Contacts from separate Accounts in various roles.

Also, you can add more fields to the Account Contact Relationship style to keep track of whether the relationship is still current (using the standard field IsActive) or to store other information in unique fields.

7. Introduced to Account Matching

If your company uses Salesforce Leads, there may be times when new Leads come in that are workers of Accounts that already exist. In this case, a Lead to Account matching method makes sense and will also make sure that the Account Owner can see everything that is going on with their account from beginning to end.

You can use Salesforce Flow and a lookup field, for example, to make automation. You can also add more features to the automation, like sending alerts or changing who owns the Lead.

8. Formula Fields and Automating Processes

Accounts can benefit from the custom capabilities that your Salesforce team builds in-house to meet the unique business needs of your company’s processes, just like other standard or custom objects. Whether it’s through calculated formula fields or simple or more complicated automation, there are a lot of ways to cut down on the number of clicks your users have to make in Salesforce.

For example, if the industry changes, a simple record-triggered flow can be set off to remind the Account Owner to update the Account plan.

Note: The examples we are showing are made in Developer Edition org with limited data and only a few custom automation. Make sure you do a good job of evaluating your current processes before building new ones. This goes for both basic automation and custom Apex. When it comes to Flow, in particular, you should think about the recommended best practices for the number of record-triggered flows that can happen per object.

9. User Experience

After all the great things you can do with the Salesforce Account object in your instance, the key to success is the user experience and enabling it. Even if the solutions you offer are useful and flexible, users still need to get used to them and see how they help. The Record Page is something I always go back to when I need quick wins. With so many out-of-the-box components to choose from, it can be hard to pick just a few. In the end, though, it all comes down to how your users and processes work. At least the following should be looked into first:

Custom Tabs: It’s very helpful that you can make different tabs within the tabs component and change them as needed to group other components and keep the page from getting too crowded. You can also choose which tab opens the record by default when you open the record.
Dynamic Actions: This feature, which is still fairly new, lets you choose which actions appear on the record page and sort them based on certain factors.
Related List Quick Links: Since the Account is an object with many related objects, giving users an easy way to use the Account Team or get to the Opportunities, for example, can save them a lot of hits.

10. Accounts aren’t just for sales

As was already said, the Salesforce Account object is one of the most important ones in your instance. Aside from Sales and Sales Operations, other teams can definitely use the information saved at the Account level. For example, the Marketing team can use these records in other processes.

Accounts as Campaign Members is a feature that lets you add individual Account or Person Account records to campaigns and watch them in the same way you would monitor other Campaign Members. This feature needs to be turned on in Setup, and it can be useful for Account-Based Marketing campaigns in particular.

Conclusion

Overall, each Account-related procedure can be quite different from one org to the next. This is why it’s important for you as a Salesforce Admin to know all of the different out-of-the-box options you can use before moving on to other options like making custom objects.