X - Salesforce Features
Client Management
A New Data Model for Working with Individuals
- Set up individual clients (not associated with a company) in one easy step
- Connect clients together to see their network of relationships
- Increase marketing effectiveness through campaigns targeted at clients
- Control access to client data by sharing with only approved users
If your company works with individual clients who are not part of a corporate entity, the new client management capabilities in Winter ’07 provide an innovative way to manage those relationships in Salesforce. Using new “person accounts,” you can seamlessly blend Salesforce’s account management tools with rich contact management capabilities such as mass emails, campaigns and lead conversion. Salesforce now provides an end-to-end solution for everything you need to build strong relationships with individual clients, from client acquisition and selling to ongoing loyalty programs.
Available for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers on a limited basis with the release of Winter ’07.
Training, Documentation, & Best Practices
- Release Notes (PDF)
- Tip Sheet on using Client Management (PDF)
- New Feature Workshop (Live Virtual Classroom)
Feature Details
- Person Accounts: Person accounts are a new type of account that lets you maintain account and contact information on a single page. A new person account icon clearly identifies your clients on page layouts and in search layouts, list views, and the recent items list. Tab and field renaming lets you rename person accounts to any term that matches your business requirements, such as “client,” “contractor,” or “patient.” Person accounts are treated like a virtual entity for API, workflow, search, mail merge, reporting, and other functional areas using account or contact entities.
- Flexible Data Model: Salesforce offers a flexible data model that lets you set up your customer entities and relationships in any way. You can model your customers as individual clients or as standard business accounts within the same Salesforce instance.
- Complete Client Lifecycle Management:You can use existing account and contact management capabilities to manage your clients throughout the entire client lifecycle. With client management you can:
- Attach clients to campaigns
- Enter and convert leads into clients or standard business accounts
- Send emails to clients
- Manage opportunities, cases, activities, etc. for clients
- Enable self-service access for clients
- Client-to-Client Relationships: Clients can be related to other clients with bidirectional visibility showing the nature of relationships among individuals.
- Client Sharing: You can use account sharing rules or territory management to share clients to targeted users or groups.
Note: Client Management is available for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers on a limited basis with the release of Winter ’07. To request access to client management functionality, please contact your technical support representative or customer success manager. Client management will be generally available in a future Salesforce release (after Winter ’07).
Find out how Salesforce can help you to better manage clients: Salesforce is designed to meet the needs of today's customer-centric organizations. You can find more information about the client management features built in to Salesforce by visiting the Sales Management features area, and our Cusotmer Service & Support product feature pages.
See today how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can help drive business success through mutually beneficial customer interactions.
10 Comments
December 12
I'm hoping that it will be easy to transfer all of our "Individual" account contacts to these new person accounts.
December 12
Sounds like a step in the right direction, but it probably doesn't go far enough. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way Salesforce handles contacts: Salesforce assumes that a contact "belongs" to a company - the reality however is that a contact is a person that is _associated_ to one or more company for a time period. People leave companies or work for more than one company. I would like salesforce to treat "people" as individual entities. I want to see all activities related to that person in the associated account and the person's history. Right now, when I delete a contact, the activity history is gone. When I move a contact to another account, the activity history moves as well and I don't see it in the original account where it belongs. When I person works for more than one company I have to treat it as two contacts with no way to see activities that are related to other accounts but dealing with the same person. This is a really big deal for us. Treat people as separate entities with a one to many relationship for an account and a way to say in this relationship that the relationship only spans a certain time period. This way you can move people between accounts and associate them with as many as they are working for.
December 13
I am happy to see SalesForce making the changes needed to recognize that not everything revolves around a "Company". We use SalesForce for maintaining our list of "Contacts". Our Contacts are our clients. Currently, I have to make an account for every contact I have just to work around this system. This makes me want to go looking for another CRM to service our needs. We only need some basic features but this change is needed for our Team addition. We also need to be able to restrict access to these clients so that only certain members of our team will have access to their data. The ability for the Administrator to give and take away this access is important. I would like to also see it made so that only the Administrator can delete a client. Our client list is our number one asset and SalesForce needs to make it so we can protect this asset.
December 18
Will this feature be made available to Professional edition?
December 22
Will this be available on developer accounts? Will it require a request to tech support as well?
January 17
Please make this available in Professional edition. Trying to manage a consumer facing business will be made so much easier than having to set up accounts for each consumer.
January 17
This has to be made available on Professional version!
January 22
I can't seem to set up my Person-Accounts -- do I need to contact someone to get it working? I thought it would automatically show up on Nonprofit accounts seeing that we were the ones screaming loudest for it!
And I appreciate & echo Lin's concerns -- it is unnerving to think that we can't follow historical relationships based on the individual -- I guess nonprofits could do a workaround, using households, maybe? But are there plans in the works to remedy this?
January 22
Client Management is available for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers on a limited basis with the release of Winter ’07. To request access to client management functionality, please contact your technical support representative or customer success manager. Client management will be generally available in a future Salesforce release (after Winter ’07).
February 26
I am looking through the blogs for answer but see no help or blog result. Please help. I am using the Outlook synced with SFA and like it. One question- My sync does not exchange status of tasks that include the contact that was entered in the task form. Both SFA and Outlook do not contain the contact from the other application after sync. Is there a setting to include contact info in the task sync? Thanks