Account Teams
Account Teams are a feature of Salesforce that allow multiple users to be associated to a single account with multiple roles. It allows you to represent holistic ownership of the account and know each person’s role in the account relationship.
How are Account Teams Used?
Once an Account has been created in Salesforce you can begin creating the view of the Account Team responsible for maintaining that account.
To define an account team you create a related record, linking a user with a role, to the account. This is done repetitively until the full relationship is present. From that point users have varying read and edit access, as determined by their role, to begin collaborating against the Account.
This feature is very useful when multiple people/departments engage with an account. Instead of having to rotate account ownership, you can define the owner, sales reps, marketing reps and support reps associated with the company/customer.
Benefits of Account Teams
Once enabled and configured many benefits are available. Along with a holistic view of ownership, they enable collaboration, more efficient Opportunity and Case management, enhanced reporting and more refined workflow capabilities.
Ownership
Through the setup you can assign roles and varying permission (read vs read/write) to the users you add to account teams. This removes the need for constantly shifting ownership at the record level and still provides access in a secure data model.
Collaboration
With the enhanced visibility and access, it’s easier for teams to know what is happening at an account level day-to-day. They can see email communications, tasks, events and more logged against the account.
Management
Determining who owns Sales vs Support ensures that relevant users have access to the appropriate Opportunities and Cases that are associated to an Account. From an Opportunity perspective you can even begin doing revenue splits against, helping determine involvement and commission expectations. From a support perspective it gives more defined insight to case management and customer success roles.
Reporting
Account Teams enable report types that drill down into pipeline management for specific teams, drives custom dashboard filtering that wouldn’t normally be available and helps show combined metrics in one report. This eliminates the need to create complex report structures to pull all team activity into one place.
Automation
Utilizing account teams enables automations like alerting and/or emailing specific roles against an account, instead of having to track the information elsewhere, query it, build a recipient list and then burst the alert or email.
Who is Impacted?
End Users
Account Teams enable users to collaborate and have enhanced access to Accounts and related records.
Admins
Administrators utilize Account Teams to ensure that roles are appropriate, reporting is accurate and automation is simplified.
Management
Managers get simplified reporting and increased efficiencies across Account Management utilizing Account Teams.