Creating an account

In this section, we will focus on accounts as customers or potential customers. There are two ways of creating accounts:

• Creating an account by converting a lead
• Creating an account by navigating to the Accounts tab

We covered creating an account by converting a lead in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads. Let's now see how we can create an account by navigating to the Accounts tab, as well as what is contained in an account record. The following screenshot shows the main navigation page in your development org, which is where we will start:

Let's look at our first account by clicking on the Accounts tab, highlighted in the following screenshot. Once you click on the Accounts tab, you will land on the page in the following screenshot:

As we discussed in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Salesforce and CRM, you will be taken to the Recently Viewed page. Click on the New button.

As you can see in the following screenshot, I entered all of the information for the new account:

Click Save after creating the account. I also created a contact, case, and opportunity in order to show you how these related items look in the next section. Creating a contact will be covered later on in this chapter and creating an opportunity and case will be covered in more detail in Salesforce for Sales, Marketing and Customer Relationship Management section of this book.

When you click on the newly created GenePoint account, you see a page similar to the one in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that when you first open an account, you land on the Related sub-tab, where you will see a few important sections:

• The highlighted section 1 shows your summary fields. These fields include Type, Phone, Website, Account Owner, Account Site, and Industry. 
• In section 2, you will notice that Salesforce automatically checks for duplicates based on the account name and lets you know whether there are any potential duplicate records.
• In section 3, you can see all the related contacts.
• In section 4, you can also see the section for logging activities, as discussed in Chapter 2, Understanding Salesforce Activities.

The following screenshot shows you the rest of this section:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see two more important sections in the Related sub-tab:

• The highlighted section 1 shows all the opportunities related to this account. This is very important as these are both closed opportunities (sales) and open opportunities (potential sales that the sales rep is currently working on).
• In section 2, you can see all the cases related to this account. Cases are related to customer service and will be covered in Chapter 7, Enhancing Customer Service Using Cases.

The Related section is very important as it shows all of the non-account records, such as opportunities, contacts, and cases, that are directly related to this organization. Let's take a look at the Details sub-tab in the following screenshot:

Looking at the Details section, you will see all the fields that are directly related to the organization, such as Type, Industry, Employees, Annual Revenue, and Website, as well as the information to directly contact this organization. The following screenshot shows what the News sub-tab contains:

In the preceding screenshot, we can see that there is an option for the Salesforce user to log in with their Twitter account to connect directly with this company. Once this is done, it shows all of the tweets that relate to this company and gives the Salesforce user a look at the latest Twitter news of this company.

There is also a way for administrators to add a News section here that directly searches the company name on Google News and shows any related articles. This is covered in more detail in Section 2, Salesforce Administration.

In this section, we learned how to navigate to an account and what an account record contains. This is important as accounts are the organizations you do business with and are the central point of interaction within the CRM. Now that we have seen what companies look like in Salesforce, let's take a look at how the people within these companies show up in Salesforce.