Accounts and Contacts

In this section, we will look at the capabilities of Sales Cloud for capturing and managing organizations and people, then explore some of the key considerations and what happens in practice.

Sales Cloud capabilities

In the Customer 360 platform, organizations are represented in the Account Object and people are modeled in the Contact Object. The relational model provides the flexibility to capture organizational structures. It is also possible to turn on the capability to relate a person to multiple Accounts as a person can be an employee of one company and a board member of another. In both cases, they may influence the purchasing process.

In the beginning, Salesforce focused on supplying software to B2B companies, where the focus was on the organization. They expanded into B2C, where the person is the main entity, not an organization. In this context, the Account record had no purpose. To reflect this operating model, Salesforce created the Person...