Account hierarchies in Salesforce help build and visualize large corporate family trees with subsidiary accounts. Native Salesforce is a great tool to get started, however, there are critical data architecture and process considerations that affect the usability and functionality of more complex account hierarchy structures.
In this article, we’re going to evaluate the ways in which you can build your account hierarchy data in Salesforce depending on your maturity:
- Buy account hierarchy data
- Build account hierarchies natively in Salesforce
- Automate the process to reduce manual time and human error
Account Hierarchy Data – What’s the Difference?
Third-party data enrichment tools such as Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo, Demandbase, and LeadSpace are fantastic assets to have. In fact, large enterprise companies often use multiple data providers to enrich leads and accounts.
One misconception, however, is thinking that account hierarchy data is the same as having account hierarchies in Salesforce. Just because you’re using a data provider, it doesn’t mean that you can inherently visualize an account hierarchy in Salesforce.
The difference between buying account hierarchy data and building an account hierarchy in Salesforce is similar to building a house. You need different materials like bricks, lumber, and cement, but simply buying these materials doesn’t mean that you have a house automatically – you still need to put it all together.
Building Account Hierarchies in Native Salesforce
Account hierarchies that are built using standard Salesforce functionality are a great starting point for building and showing the relationships between parent accounts and their subsidiaries.
Even in Lightning Experience, you can customize hierarchy columns and display useful information for your sales reps.
The Limitations of Native Salesforce Account Hierarchies
If you need a more complex solution, however, these standard account hierarchies have inherent limitations that can affect your entire go-to-market team.
No Multi or Custom Hierarchies
Lightning Experience only allows users to have one account hierarchy. This can be limiting for teams that need different ways to visualize accounts (such as a company’s legal structure or a sales team’s go-to-market structure).
And when it comes to manually building account hierarchies through parent and child accounts, a child account can only belong to one parent.
What do you do if a subsidiary account operates in multiple regions and needs to belong to several different regional hierarchies? Or, if a specific account is dealing with multiple product lines, you might want each of those product lines to be its own hierarchy.
There Are Gaps in Chain Linking
Another consideration is that, in Lightning Experience, users can use a standard parent account field to create a hierarchical relationship between accounts. By linking together child accounts with their respective parent accounts, you can build a functioning account hierarchy in a process that we call “chain linking”.
While this process may sound simple, it can be a manual, time-consuming process for complex businesses. For starters, all of the accounts must exist in Salesforce.
If one parent account is missing, you could end up with an incomplete or fragmented account hierarchy. Or, if a user incorrectly links an account to the wrong parent, you’ll have an incorrect or broken account hierarchy and could miss out on valuable sales opportunities.
Technical Limitations
Here are some of the other technical limitations to consider:
- Salesforce’s standard hierarchies only go 500 levels deep, which is not sufficient for organizations with complex structures.
- Salesforce doesn’t support roll-up summary fields for account hierarchies, meaning that you can’t create a field on the parent account that aggregates data from its child accounts without developing a custom solution.
- In Salesforce’s out-of-the-box hierarchies, there is no common value on which to report on, so it’s very difficult – or impossible – to roll up and report on the hierarchy holistically. There’s no standard feature to automatically manage or update the hierarchies based on certain rules or triggers.
- If your account hierarchy in Salesforce is built through formulas, flows, and rollups, you will likely run into resource limitations, a slow Salesforce instance, and issues from new releases.
Standard account hierarchies also raise some important questions about how you plan to connect your third-party data:
- Will you create lookups for each account in the native parent account field?
- Will you need to build custom lookup fields to get a proper understanding of the account hierarchy?
- What happens to your hierarchy in Salesforce when third-party data updates or changes such as mergers and acquisitions occur?
The manual process of building account hierarchies in Salesforce can be time-consuming and prone to error. Fortunately, there’s a better way.
How to Automate Account Hierarchies in Salesforce
Looking to reduce the efforts from operations and IT teams? Automating your account hierarchies is the next step in mastering your account hierarchy data.
What Are Automated Account Hierarchies?
Automated account hierarchies use a text string that uniquely identifies the hierarchy the account belongs to. This text string often includes the name of the company that has been identified as the global ultimate, as well as some unique identifier that helps identify the global ultimate account. Thanks to this field, all accounts in the same hierarchy will have the same hierarchy identifier.
How It Works
There are two ways that you can automate the building process of account hierarchies.
1. Automated Chain Linking
The first option is to automate the process of populating the parent account field in Lightning Experience (what we call chain linking). This can be done with Salesforce Flow, Apex, or a third-party data orchestration tool.
With this method, Salesforce Flow or the data orchestration tool will refer to a third-party database and stamp the correct account in the Parent ID field. Whether you’re building an account hierarchy that’s 10 levels or 100 levels deep, you’ll be saving valuable time.
The challenge remains, however, that the parent account needs to already exist in Salesforce. You’ll also need the help of a developer or someone experienced in using Salesforce Flow.
If the parent account doesn’t exist in Salesforce, the account needs to be manually created. In the case of account hierarchies with multiple levels, this can sometimes result in an excess of unwanted accounts just to reach the global ultimate parent.
2. Full Hierarchy Automation
Combined with third-party data, hierarchy automation can overcome the limitations of standard Salesforce and empower users with full hierarchy automation.
The benefit is that, with this option, teams can get a complete and connected view of their largest customer accounts, contacts, opportunities, and other important metrics – all inside Salesforce.
They’re also empowered to answer questions like:
- Who are my largest customers by size or revenue?
- Where are the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities?
- Where are the whitespace opportunities within my customer hierarchies?
- Based on the answers to the above, where should we be focusing our marketing and sales resources?
- Are my territories evenly balanced when you take hierarchies into consideration?
Complete Hierarchies is the first-to-market solution that automatically builds and maintains account hierarchies in Salesforce, allowing users to maximize revenue and make account data actionable.
Not only are account hierarchies visual, easy to customize, and interactive, but they also allow accounts within a hierarchy to be associated without manual chain linking – even with missing accounts, missing linkages, or missing global ultimate parents.
They also include features that can be game-changing for your go-to-market team, such as the ability to:
- Create custom rollups for entire companies.
- Organize accounts within a hierarchy by grouping them based on field.
- Add or remove accounts from hierarchies by using a drag-and-drop interface.
- Roll up and report on real-time and historical data across hierarchies and territories.
- View and maintain multiple hierarchies by defining new sets of parent/child relationships.
Summary
As it turns out, there’s an extensive amount of time and effort needed to manually build and maintain account hierarchies in Salesforce. Not to mention, standard Salesforce has plenty of limitations for admins and users to navigate.
Automated account hierarchies allow teams to forego the manual work and build and maintain accurate, customizable account hierarchies in Salesforce with ease. Not to mention, these third-party apps often include plenty of other features that can help teams build reports, sell more, and make better decisions around their business.