Overview of Accounts, Contacts, and Households

You can use the Accounts pages to manage the information related to your sales accounts, including customers, prospects, contacts, and households.

Use the account management capabilities to:

• Create and update accounts, prospects, contacts, and households

• Maintain account hierarchy

• View household relationships

• Enrich customer data

As your work with the account management application, keep in mind the following terminology:

• Account: An account is an organization that a salesperson sells to. Accounts can be prospects or customers.

• Contact: A contact is an individual. A contact need not be related to a customer. A person may be a customer or a customer contact.

• Customer: A customer is someone with whom you have a selling relationship. The selling relationship can result from the purchase of products and services, or from the negotiation of terms and conditions that provide the basis for future purchases.

• Household: A household is a group of contacts with whom you have a selling relationship. Households provide valuable segmentation information about the household as a whole, as well as summary of information about the household member contacts. Usually all the contacts reside at the same address and have a similar set of attributes that accounts do, such as team members, territories, and contacts.

• B2B and B2C: Business-to-business and business-to-consumer, or B2B and B2C, are terms that indicate the type of customer relationship:

  • B2B: The customer is a business rather than an individual consumer.

  • B2C: The customer is an individual consumer rather than a business.