Last updated on August 3rd, 2023
We’re thrilled to announce VipeCloud’s latest product enhancement: parent/child accounts. This will allow VipeCloud users to associate accounts with one-another, making it easier to structure more complicated accounts within VipeCloud.
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Do I Need To Use Account Hierarchy?
Let’s say you have an account that is a retail business with three locations, plus a corporate office. You could make the corporate office the “parent” account and its three locations into “child” accounts.
Then, when you view any of these accounts, you will see the related accounts as well as their primary contacts.
The visibility is multi-directional. There’s no need to view the parent account in order to see the related accounts.
Plus, child accounts can see the parent account in addition to the other child accounts, which will be called “siblings” from that view since they are equal.
This feature’s utility doesn’t have to be limited to multi-location businesses.
It can also help organize your accounts if you do business with related businesses that are separate entities.
An example could be if you are a software company that provides a service to manufacturers and distributors in a shared industry and some of these businesses have a mutual relationship with your business.
You could make the accounts with a shared relationship into related accounts, which would help keep organized which manufacturers are associated with which distributors, and which are independent.
Our goal with this feature is to help simplify complicated account relationships. This way you don’t have to be stuck choosing between combining multiple accounts into one, or keeping them separate, but risking confusion between your team.
This should also help managers, who don’t contact these accounts on a day-to-day basis, quickly get a top-down view of the account structure and the key contacts regardless of which account’s profile they’re viewing.
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How Do I Get Started With Parent/Child Accounts?
There are just three steps to get started with parent/child accounts:
- Create the individual accounts as you normally would.
- Click the + icon on an account you would like to make a related account.
- From here, you can either create a new account or add an existing one.
Let’s explore the relationships that accounts can have with one another. There are three relationships they can have:
- Parent
- Child
- Sibling
You can almost think of these as “tags”. They won’t change the structure of how they are displayed, but they can help you and your team with organization and quickly understanding what the relationship of the accounts are with one other.
For instance, let’s take an example retail company that has three locations. One of the locations is retail, but also serves as the flagship and with administrative offices in the back. We’d make the flagship the parent, with the other two locations being children.
When you look at the account page for the parent location, the other accounts appear as “children”. If you look at a child account page, the other “child” location will be displayed as a “sibling”, to signify that it’s on an equal tier, and the main account will show as “parent”.
This will help someone looking at the account structure for the first time to quickly understand what the account hierarchy is even if the actual account names don’t. This way you can avoid putting unnecessary descriptors in the account name (which could be inadvertently sent to them via merge tag) and is more feature-rich than a custom field.
Are There Limits To How Many Parent/Child Relationships An Account Can Have?
No, you can create very intricate account relationships if it suits you. Child accounts can have multiple parent accounts. You can also make a child account into a parent account of another account. We advise our customers to opt for simplicity, where possible. However, some businesses are inherently complicated, and the simplest solution is to have a CRM that can accurately represent those complex account relationships.
In Summary
We want to hear your feedback! If you are a current VipeCloud user, you already know we love adding features based on feedback. In fact, this entire feature was based on customer requests. If you are considering VipeCloud, we would love to walk you through this in a demo. Feel free to book a time below.
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