Account

What is an account?

An account is a CRM record for a customer or prospect company, holding its contacts, opportunities, agreements and activity in one place. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 training says an account generally represents a company or an organization, while a contact represents a person. Large customers often have parent and child accounts, such as a national property manager with dozens of individual sites.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

The account is where you see the whole relationship. Opportunity views show deals one at a time; the account view shows total spend, open renewals, who you know and which services the customer has yet to buy from you. In commercial services, account structure matters most with multi-site customers: if each building is its own account with no parent, nobody sees that one facility manager controls work across forty sites. Clean account hierarchies are also what make share-of-wallet and cross-sell analysis possible.

A facility services company has one property management firm set up as 34 separate site accounts across three branches. Rolled up under one parent account, the customer spends $1.2 million a year with the company, making it the third-largest relationship in the book. Before the rollup, no single seller owned the relationship and nobody had planned its renewal.