Grouping Leads on Accounts in Salesforce.com

June 29, 2012 by

Many Salesforce.com users in B2B sales environments struggle with the concept of leads vs. accounts and contacts. For those of you who know how to read database data models here is a link to the Salesforce.com sales objects data model.

While accounts are at the very center of the sales object data model, and are associated to contacts, opportunities, partners, cases, contracts, and most of the other standard sales objects, leads are off to the side on their own table not connected to rest of the data model.

The two biggest problems caused by the practical implications of this data model are:

  1. If you are working on an account with contacts in Salesforce.com you may not see any or all of the leads that are from the same account. As a result, you may or may not notice that someone else in your company has been corresponding with leads associated to that account.
  2. Unlike with contacts with accounts, this data model does not provide a simple way to group associated leads from the same company onto a single record. If you are calling into a lead you do not have simple view on the record of the other leads that may already exist, and that someone else may already be speaking with the lead.

The Salesforce.com purists reading this post are probably saying that this is actually a process problem and not a system problem, and to some extent they would be correct. If you check for duplicates on every single lead and convert new leads over to contacts and attach them to the account you would avoid this problem, altogether. In an ideal world, this happens automatically through a marketing automation tool such as Eloqua, Marketo or the like. Or, you have you territory assignment rules setup correctly so that all leads and contacts in a territory get assigned to the same person.

However, 4 out 5 companies that I deal with struggle with this exact problem, because it isn’t entirely intuitive, immediately obvious, and many companies do not have territories or a marketing automation tool. Furthermore, some actually intentionally keep new leads as leads even if the account already exists in the database because of the way they have their team or process structured.

If you are struggling with this problem, there is one fairly simple solution that you can implement. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it allows you to associate leads to accounts, which means that you can group them and get a single view of all leads and contacts on a single account. For a few of the companies that I have worked with this has made a world of difference.

  1. Create a custom lead field called “account”

    1. Data Type: Lookup
    2. Related Object: Account
    3. Related List Label: Leads (account)
    4. Child Relationship Name: Leads

  2. Add the new “account” field to the lead page layout below the standard company field

  3. Add the new “leads (account)” related list to the accounts page layout

  4. Enjoy

Once you’ve done that you can populate the account field on leads from the same company, and they will appear in the leads (account) related list on the account record.

Please feel free to leave questions and comments.

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Discussion

  • Tim

    Looks a lot like what we did with ‘Primary Leads’ field but makes things a lot cleaner with an account to attach the lead to rather than another lead. Nice work Ori!

    • orisfa

      Tim, Thanks for the comment!

  • http://www.salesforcesaint.com/ Celeste Keller

    This is absolutely brilliant. I’m definitely going to use it. Thank you!

    • orisfa

      Hi Celeste, Thanks for reading. I’m glad you found it useful.

  • Super_Frank

    Hi. Great first step! Wondering if you had ideas on deploying workflow to automatically populate Account field in Leads automatically (matching via email or website domain)?

  • Priyanka

    thank you, would this mean that the custom ‘account’ field under leads would need to be manually entered to show up under Accounts as lead(account)? Is there no way that any leads that come in, match with any existing accounts and show up under the account as ‘lead(account)?

    • orisfa

      Hi Priyanka, I am sure that their is a way to do this with custom built triggers, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it with out-of-the-box functionality such as workflow. however, it is something that you could probably batch update on a weekly or daily basis with a tool like DemandTools by CRM fusion.

      Please let me know if you figure it out!

      Thanks,
      -Ori

      • Priyanka

        Thanks Orisfa – will do.

      • Doug

        Thanks for this simple straightforward idea. Will definitely look into the trigger based account look up to try and automate the tieing of the fields

        • orisfa

          Doug, thanks for reading. If you can figure out the code, i can think of at least 20 people who would like to get there hands on it. It could be a great app/new feature.

          -Ori

          • http://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasayers Doug Ayers

            Hi Ori, I whipped up the code and tests tonight. I tried pasting it in this comment but the code got all garbled. I’ll send you the attachments via LinkedIn

  • Sourceevian

    Hi, it seems great! Can you detail what you mean by “create a custom lead field called account”.
    I can’t find how to do this. Thank you very much for your help!
    PM

    • Chris Rickard

      Go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | Leads | Fields. Scroll down to the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section of the fields screen and click to New button. Select the Lookup Relationship option and click the Next button. In the related To dropdown select Account, click Next. The rest seems pretty straight forward.