If you are a manufacturer using Salesforce, one of the challenges is how to manage your global accounts and provide insights to your global account managers using salesforce. The problem is that even though you have parent accounts which gives you the hierarchy and provided ownership to the global account manager, he is still not able to see all the opportunities on his child accounts, monitor account plans and tasks in Salesforce in one view.  🙄 So what can you do in Salesforce to allow your global account managers to monitor their account easily? This post would provide you some guidelines.

Roll up your opportunities and show it on parent account page

One of the things you should do is to create an opportunity section on your page layout and show opportunities won in the current year, previous year, the total amount on your pipeline based on opportunity stages. I know most of the manufacturers use a BI tool to show data but it becomes very hard for account managers to view the data by clicking more than 2 or 3 times to see the report. So using the free DLRS app, you can easily sum the opportunities by stages and display the data right to the global account managers quickly. If you would like to learn how to do this, you can click on this great post by Andy using the DLRS app.

Show Context sensitive actions and next steps

Most of the manufacturers use custom objects to manage account plans, call reports which allow the sales reps to update the status of the accounts to their sales managers. As part of this activity, most of the sales reps log key activities on the accounts using tasks or custom fields on the objects. These key activities can be easily rolled up to the global account using process builder and flows which would show up on the task history on the parent account. By showing up the tasks on the related list on the parent account, global account managers can view the tasks in one view instead of searching on child accounts and follow up on them to take next steps.  😛 Here are some use cases which you can do which would allow your global account managers jump in joy.

1. Every time a new account plan or account plan is modified, notify the account manager using a chatter post or email task.
2. When an opportunity moves closer to the closing stage or moves away from the closing stage, a notification can be sent to the global account manager.
3. When there is a change in account owners on child accounts which can come from your SAP integration or other jobs, you can notify the global account managers.

Allow Collaboration on Key Accounts

One of the key features which are less used is Chatter when it comes to global account management. Most of the collaboration happens in emails which are not tracked, hard to read and never gets into the right people at the right time. One option you can do is create a chatter group for global accounts which are key accounts and have automation on chatter posts to post on key activities, opportunity moving on pipelines and other activities. This way there is always shared the information which can be useful for global account managers to view or collaborate in one place.

To summarize, here are some key takeaways for you to do immediately in salesforce for your global account managers.

1. Use DLRS app to roll up opportunity amounts based on stages, product lines to the parent account.
2. Notify global account managers on key activities on child accounts.
3. Leverage chatter to collaborate with account teams on global accounts.

As always feel free to post your thoughts or comments and activities you do know which helps in to manage your global accounts easily. Please email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.

1. Challenge
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