Salesforce account management is the practice of keeping each customer company in one account record, with its contacts, opportunities, cases and activities attached, so everyone who works with that customer sees the same picture. In Salesforce it rests on five features: the account record, account hierarchies, account teams, Contacts to Multiple Accounts and account plans. This guide shows how to set each one up well.
This post was first published in 2020 and has been rewritten for 2026, with current features and a practical setup checklist.
What is an account in Salesforce?
An account is the Salesforce record for a company or organisation you do business with. An account is a company or organisation you do business with: a customer, a partner, a prospect or a competitor. The people who work there are contacts. The account is the hub that ties together:
- Contacts: the people you deal with.
- Opportunities: the deals in progress and won (see our guide to opportunities in Salesforce).
- Cases: service requests and complaints.
- Activities: calls, emails, meetings and tasks.
- Files, notes and contracts.
Good account management is mostly about keeping this hub accurate and making sure the right people can see and act on it.
How should you structure accounts?
For most B2B companies, the best structure is one account per location, joined in an account hierarchy. The first decision is how to model large customers. Trailhead's account relationships unit compares two options:
| Approach | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| One global account per company | Simple company-wide reporting | Large volumes of contacts, deals and cases in one record; hard to see local needs |
| One account per location, linked in a hierarchy | Ownership, sharing and reporting per location, plus the company view through the hierarchy | More records and more complex reports |
Trailhead recommends a separate account for each location, joined up with an account hierarchy. That matches our experience: it lets a regional rep own the Singapore office while a global account director still sees the whole group.
Business accounts or person accounts?
Business accounts model companies, with contacts as the people who work there. If you sell to individual consumers rather than companies, consider person accounts, which combine account and contact fields in one record. Many orgs need both, for example a bank with corporate and retail customers. Test person accounts in a sandbox first: Salesforce's admin guide notes that once person accounts are enabled, they can't be disabled.
How do accounts get into Salesforce?
Accounts are created in three ways: by hand, by converting a lead, or by importing them.
- Manually, from the Accounts tab, usually for a new customer a rep already knows.
- Lead conversion. Converting a qualified lead creates an account, a contact and, optionally, an opportunity, according to Salesforce Help's lead conversion FAQ. You can attach the lead to an existing account instead, which is how you avoid duplicates; our guide to lead status covers the stages before conversion.
- Import, with the Data Import Wizard for small loads or Data Loader for large or repeat ones, typically during a migration.
Whichever way they arrive, duplicate rules should check new accounts at entry.
Account hierarchies
An account hierarchy links parent and child accounts so you can see a whole corporate group. To build a hierarchy, fill in the Parent Account field on each child account. Salesforce then shows the family tree: open an account and select the hierarchy icon next to its name, as described in the Trailhead unit. Use hierarchies for subsidiaries, regional offices and franchise networks, and keep the top-level account for the legal parent so roll-up reports make sense.
Account teams: who works on the account?
An account team lists everyone who works on an account and gives each a role and access level. Large accounts are rarely handled by one person. Account teams let you list everyone involved, such as the owner, a sales engineer, a customer success manager and a support lead, and give each a role with its own access to the account, its opportunities and its cases. Trailhead notes that an admin must turn account teams on and set up the roles. Users can also save a default account team in their personal settings and add it to accounts with the Add Default Team action, or have Salesforce add it automatically.
Account teams also make reporting easier: you can answer "which accounts does our solutions team support?" without guessing from ownership alone. How sharing and access work in general is covered in our Salesforce security guide.
Contacts to Multiple Accounts
Contacts to Multiple Accounts lets one contact relate to several accounts without duplicate records. People move between companies, sit on several boards or work as consultants for more than one client. With Contacts to Multiple Accounts enabled by an admin, each contact keeps one direct account, shown in the Account Name field, and can have indirect relationships with any number of other accounts. The Related Contacts list on the account shows current and past relationships, and you can record roles or add custom fields such as a "main contact" checkbox. This avoids creating duplicate contacts, which is one of the most common causes of messy account data.
Account plans
Account plans are standard Salesforce records for the objectives and measures you set with a key customer. For key accounts, a plan matters as much as the record. Salesforce now has a standard Account Plan object, available from API version 62.0, which represents customer information with measurable objectives and steps for growing the relationship. Related objects hold the objectives and their measures. A useful account plan answers four questions:
- What does the customer want to achieve this year?
- Where do we stand today: products owned, renewal dates, open cases, satisfaction?
- What are our two or three objectives for the account, and how will we measure them?
- Who on the account team does what, and by when?
Some fields on the object need industry licences, so check what is available in your edition before designing around it.
Salesforce account management best practices
Good account management comes down to clear rules for what an account is, clean data and current ownership.
- Agree what an account is. Write down when to create a new account versus a child account or a contact, and enforce it with validation rules where you can.
- Use record types for different account kinds. Customers, partners and suppliers usually need different fields and page layouts; see our guide to record types.
- Turn on duplicate rules and clean up regularly. Duplicate accounts split history and confuse reporting. In Lightning Experience you can merge up to three accounts at a time, business or person accounts but not one of each, and you need Delete permission on accounts. Our merge guide covers contacts too.
- Keep ownership current. Reassign accounts when people leave or territories change, so no customer sits with an inactive user.
- Log activity against the account. Email and calendar integration, such as our Outlook integration guide describes, keeps the history complete without extra typing.
- Report on account health. Build reports and dashboards for open pipeline, renewals due, open cases and last activity date per account; our reports guide shows how.
A setup checklist for admins
Set up account management in this order, because each step depends on the one before. If you also manage projects for these customers, see ways to use Salesforce for project management.
| Step | Setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Decide the account model (per location plus hierarchy, or global) | Everything else depends on it |
| 2 | Account record types and page layouts | Show each team the fields it needs |
| 3 | Organisation-wide default and sharing rules for accounts | Control who sees which accounts |
| 4 | Account teams and team roles | Give shared access to the people who work on an account |
| 5 | Contacts to Multiple Accounts | Avoid duplicate contacts |
| 6 | Duplicate and matching rules | Stop new duplicates at entry |
| 7 | Account plans for key accounts | Turn records into a growth plan |
| 8 | Account health reports and dashboards | Spot risk and opportunity early |
Getting help
Account structure is hard to change once thousands of records and reports depend on it, so it is worth getting right early. Techila is a Salesforce Summit Partner; our Sales Cloud services team designs account models, hierarchies, teams and account plans, and cleans up existing data. Talk to us about your account setup.
Frequently asked questions
What is an account in Salesforce?
An account is a company or organisation you do business with, such as a customer, partner or prospect. The people who work there are contacts, and the account record links them to the opportunities, cases, activities and files related to that company.
Should I create one account per company or one per location?
Trailhead recommends a separate account for each location, linked with an account hierarchy. Separate accounts let you set ownership, sharing and reporting per location, while the hierarchy keeps the company-wide view.
What is an account team in Salesforce?
An account team is the group of people who work on one account, such as the account owner, a sales engineer and a support manager. Each member gets a role and an access level to the account and its opportunities and cases. An admin must turn account teams on and set up the roles.
Can a contact belong to more than one account?
Yes, once an admin enables Contacts to Multiple Accounts. Each contact keeps one direct account, shown in the Account Name field, and can have indirect relationships with other accounts, which appear in related lists with their roles.
Does Salesforce have account plans?
Yes. Salesforce has a standard Account Plan object, available from API version 62.0, that holds objectives, measures and next steps for growing a customer relationship. Check your edition and Setup to see whether account plans are turned on in your org.