An account can represent your customer, partner, or competitor. A customer account allows you to store your customer data, so you can have a 360-degree view of your customer. Whereas, a partner account helps you to better manage your partner by allowing them limited access to your Salesforce using the Partner community. A competitor account allows you to manage your competitor offerings, rates, and service industries.
As per a Gartner report, 65% of a company's business comes from existing customers and it costs them five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied. This indicates the importance of maintaining a good relationship with existing customers and, at the same time, follow-up with focused customer engagement to grow the relationship and increase revenue growth on an ongoing basis.
The different types of accounts in Salesforce are as follows:
- Business account (B2B): When you sell a product or offering to another organization, such a business is called business-to-business selling. Use the business (business-to-business) account to store your customer (organization) information in Salesforce. By default, the business account is enabled for every Salesforce organization. For example, Salesforce.com Inc. sells its product to other organizations.
- Person account (B2C): When you sell a product or service to an individual, it is called business-to-person selling. Use the person (business-to-person) account to store customer (individual) information in Salesforce. To enable a person account in your Salesforce org, you must raise a support case with Salesforce. For example, MetLife is an insurance firm selling their products to an individual as well as organizations.
You can create a new business account by using a user interface, or you can also import it from another organization by using the import wizard and data loader. Perform the following steps to create a new account:
- Go to the Lead tab, then open Cathal Murtagh lead.
- Now, click on the Convert button available on top of the page to convert the lead.
- The new account will look like the following screenshot:
Make sure that you have created an account, a contact, and an opportunity, as shown in the preceding screenshot.