The Great Salesforce Job Market Reset
December 09, 2024
By Jordyn Jaffer
There are divided viewpoints on Person Accounts in the Salesforce Community . Some view it as a risky or bad option for B2C companies, some support the functionality, and others have never even heard about Person Accounts!
My introduction to Person Accounts was during my first Salesforce position with the Atlanta Braves. As an organization that was both B2C and B2B, we considered Person Accounts to help manage the data for our individual customers. This idea was shot down pretty quickly by our Salesforce Developer who did not think Person Accounts were a good idea and wanted to avoid them at all costs. Through this experience, I also joined the portion of Salesforce professions that disliked Person Accounts and planned to avoid them for the remainder of my Salesforce career. This did not last long, and my opinion changed when I joined my current employer at the beginning of 2020, and was introduced to a Salesforce org that had Person Accounts enabled to help manage student data.
The Salesforce definition for Person Accounts is: “Person Accounts store information about individual people by combining certain Account and Contact fields into a single record.”
Another understanding of this is a marriage between Accounts and Contacts to form a single location for an individual’s data while also being flexible enough to act like an Account when necessary.
A user no longer has to associate a company with a Contact because the Contact gets automatically created and associated with the Account when a Person Account is created.
When a user tries to view a Contact associated with a Person Account, the user will be redirected to the Account (Person Account) record. This means the user only needs to navigate to the Accounts tab to manage both business Account records and their individual Accounts.
When accessing Person Accounts in Setup, I recommend that you switch over to the Salesforce Classic view as it is slightly easier to navigate to the Person Account configuration section than it would be in the Lightning Experience. A Person Account is not its own object, but it does have object features such as page layouts, compact layouts and record types. There is also a nice feature that will show you which of your Contact fields are used for Person Account records when looking at the Account fields list.
Another way to understand Person Accounts is to view how they correspond with Leads in a Salesforce org. Any Salesforce professional that has worked with Leads understands that a company name is required to convert that Lead into a Contact that is associated with an Account for the company. This has frustrated some Salesforce Administrators who have users that put “dummy” information in the company field in order to convert their Lead. My previous company had over 1 million Contacts on a single “dummy” Account and it definitely caused performance issues when multiple Contacts associated with that Account were being accessed. Person Accounts help solve this problem by giving users to create Person Accounts straight from their Lead record.
In order to do this a user would leave the company field blank on their Lead and follow the normal conversion process to convert the Lead into a Person Account. Users are still able to convert Leads into Contacts with Business Accounts if the Company field is populated with a value.
Person Accounts can benefit your organization, but it is not possible to disable the feature once you start using them. This means it is very important to do thorough research to determine if Person Accounts are a viable solution. Some of the questions that you should be asking during this research are:
Even though Person Accounts are a great solution for some businesses or organizations, there are some disadvantages associated with them:
This is because a Person Account record cannot have a field that looks up to another Person Account record.
Person Accounts are not as risky as some Salesforce professionals have stated in the past and could actually be a great solution for certain businesses. Small and mid-sized companies that are mainly business to consumer should consider Person Accounts to streamline their Sales Operations. As with any feature or product, there are some disadvantages that should be reviewed before making any decisions.
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