Launchpad Lesson 12 - Account Setup

All right, welcome back. Okay, so let's just keep going setting up our sales objects. Now, time for the account object.

Accounts in Salesforce are one of the most important objects in the system. They are used to hold information on any company that we interact with. One of the big misnomers about accounts, particularly with salespeople, is that they tend to think that an account means customer. When in fact, an account can represent any company that we work with or want to work with. For example, in addition to customers, accounts can also represent prospects, former customers, partners, vendors, and even competitors.

Just like on the lead object, the details area of the account object holds a collection of standard fields that have already been set up by Salesforce and then any custom fields that you want to create. We'll take a look at some of the standard fields and then build our own custom fields for our company's account object.

Keep in mind when thinking about custom fields for this object that the information should only be about the company. We've seen many cases where admins will take information that is related to the contact or opportunity and put it on the account. Not to worry though, you're not going to make that mistake.

Okay. Once again, the changes you'll make to your account object will be based on how your business works and who you sell to. But we believe that there are some fairly consistent applications to the account object that are worth making no matter what your business does. So let's look at modifying the following standard fields. Go to setup, object manager, account, and then fields and relationships.

One thing before you actually make the changes to Salesforce, remember that we strongly suggest that you use your Launchpad training worksheet to review these fields with your sales team. If you've already got your worksheet from the last lesson, this lesson will focus on the account worksheet tab. If you don't have it, we've included it in this lesson as well.

First, find a field called type. Scroll down to the account type picklist values and review all of the default options.

For Rocket Shop, we're going to deactivate analyst, integrator, investor, press, and other. Again, don't delete these because you may have a reason to use them one day.

Now we're going to click new to add distributor and supplier and then click save.

We'll rename partner to channel partner.

Now, let's reorder them so that the most selected options for us are near the top.

We're not going to make any of these the default selection, at least for now.

Now, note how we didn't add past or former customer to this field. It's not that we don't care about this. We do, but we're going to deal with this in a different method.

Click fields and relationships again and this time find industry.

Review the options and make the changes you want. Salesforce gives you a pretty broad list already, so it might just be a matter of deactivating some and activating others. There's a short list of inactive values at the bottom. We're actually going to activate aerospace and defense because that's a key Rocket Shop market.

And then a new one we're going to add is called space exploration as this is also one of our key markets.

No surprise that Salesforce didn't have it. It's pretty new. We'll display this list alphabetically by clicking here.

Now you should do the same thing for account source. Again, Salesforce already includes a lot of choices for this list, but perhaps there's one or two sources that drive your business that aren't listed here, and maybe some that are listed that aren't as applicable.

All right, now it's time to add some custom fields that you've identified for your business. And this is particularly important. If you added custom fields on the lead object, you want to add those same fields on the account object if they are related to account data. Always remember the rule of thumb is that the custom fields you create in an object should be directly about that object and not any related objects.

For Rocket Shop, we're going to add rockets launched annually and annual rocket ship budget because that data really belongs to an account. But we are not going to add primary product interest. You certainly could put it on the account, but that isn't where it really belongs.

You have to ask yourself, what object is this data really related to? In the case of primary product interest, this is information more related to a potential sale. So, we'll save that field for the opportunity object.

The other thing to note is that even though you created these custom fields already, those fields were strictly dedicated to the lead object. You have to recreate them for the account object, but you've already done the exercise once, so it should really be very repetitive to do it again.

Let's just show you how to add the field for rockets launched annually, almost as a review from the lesson on lead setup.

Click fields and relationships. Select new, then number field. Click next.

Then type rockets launched annually and change the length to four.

It's still a good idea to include some help text for the users. Remember, not all of your users will work with lead records, so this could be the only time that they see this field.

Leave these three checkboxes blank. Click next.

Make this field visible to all users. Click next.

Ensure it's on the account layout and click save and new to create the next field, annual rocket ship budget, a currency field.

And just follow the same steps.

When I get to length, I'm going to key in nine to accommodate budgets in the billions of dollars. Launching rocket ships is pretty expensive, you know.

The rest of the steps are the same as the prior one. When you're done, click save.

Now, another custom field we recommend for the account object is called active, a checkbox. It's going to represent the account status.

Remember how we acknowledged that an account could be a former customer? Well, instead of creating a type called former customer, we'll create a new field called active.

This should be getting familiar by now, but let's click new.

This time select checkbox. Next.

Call it active.

Select checked as the default value. This way, when new accounts are created, the presumption is they are accounts we actively work with. And if they ever become inactive, the user can remove the check mark.

This is far superior to deleting accounts, which is something you should have removed as a permission for your users anyway back in the lesson on profiles.

Add some help text, allow everyone to see it, put it on the account layout, and click save.

Now, let's work on our account page layout.

You're still on the object manager for the account, but this time, select page layouts and then select account layout.

Honestly, I think Salesforce nailed it here. Under account information, I would say all of these fields are relevant and we can leave everything here. The only thing I'd do is I'd move the parent account field under account name. We'll cover what this does in just a minute.

You can also see our three custom fields here on the left-hand column at the bottom where Salesforce always places new custom fields. We'll be moving these around in a second.

Let's create a new section and place it directly below account information.

Call it rocket ship info and drag these two custom fields down here.

And remember the field called active. Here it is. Let's move it up and put it right below the type field.

Then click quick save to lock in your changes so far.

Let's set up our related lists next.

Here's what I like. Related contacts first. That's good. Opportunities definitely next.

Now, you could get rid of campaign influence, contracts, and cases. But just because we're not covering them in this specific Launchpad course, it certainly doesn't mean you can't use them. It's really up to you.

But what I've been arguing for all along is that if you're not using certain objects, then remove them. Keep things simple. You can always put them back here when you're ready to do more with Salesforce.

The last thing we typically do is design our page template with the Lightning App Builder. But remember, we've already done that for the account in the lesson on the Lightning App Builder. So that's taken care of.

So let's look at a couple of other features.

Remember way back in the lesson on Salesforce terminology and navigation, I told you that every record has one owner. You saw the account owner field on our page layout.

The best practice for this field is to assign the person who is primarily responsible for the sales of this account as the record owner. This is important because it allows that user to pull a list of all accounts that are assigned to them using a special filter called my accounts.

We'll be covering this in two of the upcoming lessons on list views and reports.

Secondly, I showed you the parent account field and we moved it under the account name field. Salesforce uses the parent account field to allow you to create a hierarchy with the account structure. It's a lookup field, meaning that it requires a record to populate it.

This feature is very useful when working with national companies that have many different offices. For example, let's say you're working with an account that has four offices across the country, a head office, and three branches. Parent accounts allow you to set this up in Salesforce.

Let's walk through an example.

We need to go back into the Rocket Shop sales app and find an account called Space Shuttle Supply, which is one of Rocket Shop's national suppliers and has their corporate head office located in Seattle.

You should notice some of our changes to the account object, including the parent account field, which we moved over here.

This record has the parent account field empty and always will because it's at the top of the heap.

Now, Space Shuttle Supply Texas in Austin is a branch location and a child account of the corporate office. To designate this, we want to be on the child record, which we are, and complete the parent account lookup field with Space Shuttle Supply in Seattle.

And in fact, you can go multiple layers deep. For example, if the Austin location had another child office in Round Rock, Texas beneath it, you could create that parent-child relationship, too.

The key is always start at the child and add the parent, not the other way round.

Let's add one more child to the main head office, Space Shuttle Supply Florida in Orlando.

This location is at the same level as the Austin location. So, we'll add the rocket supply in Seattle as the parent.

Now that we've built the hierarchy, we can click this little icon on any of the account records in this family to see how the Space Shuttle Supply accounts are interconnected.

This is an awesome feature for your sales team to establish account families.

Wow, that was a lot, right? But just think, you've already set up two objects. Just two more to go. And we're also halfway through this entire course.

You're getting there. Just keep hanging in. We'll see you soon.