1. Implementing Sales
  2. Account and Contact Basics

Account and Contact Basics

Some basic terminology first. Your sales application is set up for business-to-business sales, so accounts are the organizations you sell to. The account Type field indicates if an account is a prospect or a customer. You can create contacts for a specific account or you can create standalone contacts.

Accounts in the CX Sales UI

You can track lots of information for accounts in the various tabs, but most of the information comes from other business objects. For account-specific information, you use the Overview and Profile tabs. Here's what you can tell about the sample account in the screenshot just by looking at the Overview tab:

  • You know that this account is an existing customer because the account Type field (callout 1) is set to Customer.

  • The Industry field displays the primary industry for this customer (callout 2).

    You can add multiple industries for each account, but, if you're assigning accounts by industry, then the account gets assigned using the primary industry.

    Tip: If you're planning to assign accounts by industry, you may want to make entry in the Industry field required when salespeople create accounts. While you can use Application Composer to make most fields required, Industry isn't one of them. For Industry, you must use a combination of Page Composer and some Groovy scripting. See these Oracle Support documents: 2261254.1 and 2193779.1.

  • The tab displays the primary address (callout 3) and information about the primary contact (callout 4).

  • The account owner (callout 5) is usually the person who created the account, but can be reassigned.

  • If you're tracking account relationships, clicking the Ultimate Parent field (callout 6) gets you to the top of the account hierarchy. You must expose this field during setup.

  • The Parent Account (callout 7) just gets you to the immediate parent account.

  • You can view and edit the whole account hierarchy by clicking Manage Account Hierarchy (callout 8).

Portion of the Edit Account page highlighting information described in the text.

On the Edit Account, Profile tab, salespeople can add additional industry classifications for the account (callout 1 in the following screenshot). Without further setup, sales territory assignment uses only the primary industry, indicated by the check mark icon.

There are multiple ways that you can configure the Profile tab. For example, you can:

  • Capture multiple emails, phones, and names and tack customer and contact preferences (callout 2).

  • Capture multiple addresses. Only the primary address is used for opportunity assignment (callout 3)

  • Display additional fields, including your own classifications that you can use for opportunity assignment (callout 4).

Edit Account page, Profile tab with highlights showing different sections you can add

Accounts in the Digital Sales UI

Accounts in the Digital Sales UI are very different. Gone are the tabs and much of the detail on the overview page. Records are divided into three sections:

  • Summary (callout 1 in the screenshot)

    Lists the primary information about the account and contact.

  • Action Bar (callout 2)

    Instead of clicking on tabs as you do in CX Sales, you enter commands to view and enter detailed information about the account.

  • Panels with key information (callout 3)

    Key related information about the account is displayed in panels and linked pages. You access other information using the Action Bar.

Screenshot of a sample account record
For more information about the way Digital Sales has transformed the UI layout and functionality see the topic Anatomy of a Record.

Industry Classification Category Types for Accounts

You can specify which industry classification category you want to use for your accounts. By default, the application uses the CUSTOMER_CATEGORY classifications created by Oracle. The other classification available categories include:

  • 1972 SIC

  • 1977 SIC

  • 1987 SIC

  • CUSTOMER_CATEGORY

  • NACE

  • NAF

  • NAICS_1997

  • NAICS_2002

You can add other classification categories, such as NAICS 2012 and NAICS 2017, to this list as described in the topic: Add to the List of Available Industry Classification Categories.

If you plan to enrich your account records with Dun & Bradstreet Corporation data available from Oracle Data as a Service (DaaS), then you must either select the 1987 SIC category or add another supported category, such as NAICS 2017, to the list.

Related Topics