People often work with more than one company. A business owner might own more than one company or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple organizations. Salesforce provides a way to relate a single contact to multiple accounts so you can easily track the relationships between people and businesses without creating duplicate records. It allows you to maintain a relationship with the account and its related contacts.

When you use Contacts to Multiple Accounts, each contact still requires a primary account (the account in the Account Name field). The contact and its primary account have a direct relationship. But you can add other accounts to the contact. These secondary account-contact relationships are indirect. You can define roles with each relationship and add more custom fields as per your business case scenarios.

Let’s take an example

John Smith is president of Acme Corporations, and Acme is the account on his contact record. But John is also involved with the nonprofit media organization Greendot Media. By adding Greendot Media as a related account on John’s contact record, you can track this other relationship. John is considered a direct contact to Acme because Acme is the account on his contact record. And he’s considered an indirect contact to Greendot Media and any other accounts that he becomes related to. John also appears on the Related Contacts related list for Greendot Media and any other accounts that he’s indirectly related to.

Atul Gupta

Atul Gupta is CloudVandana’s founder and an 8X Salesforce Certified Professional who works with globally situated businesses to create Custom Salesforce Solutions.

Atul Gupta, a dynamic leader, directs CloudVandana’s Implementation Team, Analytics, and IT functions, ensuring seamless operations and innovative solutions.