This article will provide a brief overview of the different objects available in Salesforce, how Swantide recommends using them, and recommendations for deciding which object a field should be created on:
Standard Objects
Accounts
Represent a company or organization that you interact with. Accounts can have a 1:many relationship with both Opportunities and Leads
Contacts
Represent a person your company engages with.
Opportunity
Represents a sales process. You may have several Opportunities on one Account, even if the stakeholders remain unchanged. For example, you may have a renewal for a Closed Won Opportunity, or a New Business Opportunity wants to delay further conversations for 6 months. In both of these examples, you should create a second Opportunity (as opposed to editing the initial Opportunity). This provides more accurate data on the effectiveness of your renewal process, sales cycle duration, and more.
Leads
A parking lot for messy data about an individual. See more explanation in the Contacts vs. Leads section.
Campaign
A group of Leads and Contacts that are linked to certain marketing efforts. Swantide can help integrate your marketing automation platform with Salesforce, and link your marketing efforts with sales Opportunities and Closed Won revenue in Salesforce.
Account & Opportunity Teams
Allow you to link multiple Salesforce users to an Account or Opportunity record (by default, you can only associate the record's owner to the record). Note that you need Salesforce's Enterprise Edition for this feature.
Contact Role
Indicates the role that a Contact plays on a given Opportunity (e.g. Economic Decision Maker, Technical Sponsor, etc.). This is particularly useful when:
You have several Contacts on one Account, but not all of them are involved with an Opportunity. This makes it clear who the relevant stakeholders are, and allows emails and calendar events to be synced onto the Opportunity record
You want to link fields on the Contact object to fields on the Opportunity object. For example, if you don't use a marketing automation platform and store UTM values on the Contact, the Contact would need to be created as an Opportunity Contact role to link it with Closed Won revenue.
Contacts vs. Leads
Both Contacts and Leads store information about individuals (e.g. Name, Email, Phone Number, Company). Contacts should be used whenever you've validated that they are a real person, whereas Leads should be viewed as a parking lot for messy data.
The Contact object allows you to see much more context for the associated Account, including any historical emails, calendar events, Opportunities, and other Contacts linked to the same Account. These are all helpful data points for your sales team. The lead object only provides information about that one record.
That's why we suggest using the Lead object only for messy or unverified data, which helps keep your Salesforce clean. If you utilize Swantide's Web-to-Lead form, which helps bring sign-ups from your website into Salesforce automatically, those should be created as Leads by default, as many people (e.g. recruiters or other spam) should not be tracked in your Salesforce. As soon as you've validated that the Lead is a real person, you should convert the Lead into a Contact and Account. This can either be a new Account or mapped to an existing Account.
Custom Objects
Onboarding Cycle
Custom object that represents the post-sales process. This is ideal for Customer Success teams who want to track the onboarding process in Salesforce.
Product Instance
Represents an "instance" or workspace of your product. This is particularly useful for PLG companies in keeping a clean Account hierarchy in Salesforce. Swantide can partner with you to bring new workspaces into Salesforce, as well as other usage metrics for your sales team.
Guidance for Creating Custom Fields
We often get questions about which object to create custom fields on, particularly when it comes to Accounts and Opportunities. It's important to remember that Accounts have a 1:many relationship with Opportunities, so data that would be true universally (e.g. Industry, Website, Employee Range, Competitors) should be stored at the Account level, while data that is specific to a sales process (e.g. Products, ARR, Contract Start Date, etc.) should be stored at the Opportunity level