In this video, we’ll show you how to set up Contacts to Multiple Accounts so your sales
reps can easily track the relationships between the people and businesses they work with—without
creating duplicate records.
People often work with more than one company.
A business owner might own more than one company or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple
organizations.
That’s why it’s important to allow your sales reps to relate a contact to more than
one account.
Setup is quick and easy, but first, a bit of helpful terminology...
The account listed on a contact record is the primary account.
The relationship between a contact and its primary account is a direct relationship.
Additional accounts can be related to the contact.
These secondary relationships are indirect relationships.
Got it?
Good.
Let’s set up Contacts to Multiple Accounts.
First, navigate to the Accounts Settings page and enable the feature.
It may take some time, so we’ll send you an email when the process is complete.
You’ll notice some additional setup options.
Take a look and decide how you want to handle... what happens to a direct relationships when
an account is deleted... ...and whether to save the previous direct
relationship when a contact gets a new primary account.
Also, when you use Contacts to Multiple Accounts, it doesn’t always make sense for activities
to roll up to a contact’s primary account.
Reps might want a particular activity related one of the contact’s other accounts.
Head over to the Activities Settings page and turn off the automatic rollup behavior.
There are some things to consider when changing this activity setting.
For details, take a look at the additional resources at the end of this video.
You now have the Account Contact Relationship object, which is used to store the details
about...you got it!...the relationship between a contact and an account.
If you want to use custom fields to capture unique information about relationships—for
example the best time to call a contact—now’s a good time to set that up.
This can also a good time to modify the page layout or create your own so that you’re
capturing the most relevant details about the relationships.
Next, make sure your account and contact page layouts include the necessary related lists.
Go to the relevant account page layout, in this case Account Layout, click Related Lists,
and add the Related Contacts related list.
We recommend you modify this related list by adding the Direct field.
That way, it’ll be easy to see which contacts are directly related to the account.
Because the Related Contacts related list automatically includes all direct contacts,
you can remove the Contacts related list from your account page layouts.
Next, go to the relevant contact page layout, in this case Contact Layout.
Click Related Lists, and add the Related Accounts related list.
Again, we recommend you add the Direct field so it’s easy to see which accounts are directly
related to the contact.
That’s it.
Now your users can relate a contact to more than one account.
No more needing to create duplicate contacts to capture these additional relationships.
Remember, if you disable Contacts to Multiple Accounts, all indirect account-contact relationships
are deleted.
The direct relationships remain.
To learn more, see the following topics in Salesforce Help
or join us on the trail at trailblazer dot success dot com