Remember from my previous posts how accounts, partners, contacts, household and even competitors are actually all alike? They are for Sales Cloud all ‘parties’ of different party types. But what if you want to create a competitor that you also cooperate with (partner)? What if you want to create coopetitors? Or any of the possible combinations of a party that fulfills multiple roles. An account that is also a partner, an account that is a competitor …
How to create coopetitors
Let us imagine that we need an account that is also a partner and a competitor at the same time. No reason not to use a extreme imaginary example right? 🙂
In the example below I chose to start with creating an account, but you can start with creating a partner or a competitor also.
Now using the same name and address, I created a partner. The moment I tried to save the partner, Data Quality in Sales Cloud stopped me from continuing. Sales Cloud noticed that an account with the same name and address already existed. I was offered a choice:
- combine the partner and the account in one by choosing to continue with the already existing account
- create a separate partner that happens to share the same name and address
I chose for the first option by selecting the already existing account.
This reuses the account definition for the partner effectively creating a party that is both a customer and a partner.
Rinse and repeat for the competitor.
The result is best observed using the data steward functionality in Sales Cloud. I soon will go into more details of what Customer Data Management in Sales Cloud is capable off in a new series of posts, but here I use it to get more details about the account definitions.
For the account I created, I can see that it can be used as a customer, a competitor and a partner. Well … this account can also be a partner as soon as I active the partnership 🙂
