Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Account Name Complications

In a less complex setup, Salesforce Accounts are used solely to track and manage a sales rep's accounts and tie his opportunities to them.  There are less stringent naming conventions, less emphasis on data quality, especially around account names.

Typically, a sales rep will refer to their accounts by their commonly accepted name, or "Trade Name", like Salesforce, or Apple, or Starbucks.

As soon as companies add on certain processes into Salesforce, for example, Quotes and Contracts, a more formal process for names is required.  For example, Quotes and Contracts will typically need the full legal name, like Apple, Inc.  It even gets more complicated when their legal company name is totally different from their common name, or "Doing Business As (DBA)" name.

Start doing business in countries with local languages and special characters, the local sales reps will prefer to record their local language name, as that is their common name, but it becomes a headache for HQ Operations who want to manage and cleanse the information.  And when it comes time for Quotes and Contracts, HQ will most likely require Western character company names.

My current thinking on this is that in Salesforce, the standard Name field will always be the common name, or their DBA, or their local language name.  This makes it easily searchable for the bulk of the field users who are local.  This also means that data cleansing should be handled by local administrators.  Who else would be better to determine whether two records are the same company but a local person?  Alternatively, give the field users the ability to request for merges.  That way you can have a centralized data administrator.

In summary: use Name as the common name or DBA name, and add another text field, Legal Company Name, and maybe a third field for Western Language Name, although you could probably get a way with using the same field if the label is clear enough.  Unfortunately "Other Name" is very vague.





No comments:

Post a Comment