Discrepancies in Reports and Report Actions

I learned an interesting thing about reports today: What's displayed in a report can be different from what gets exported or from what gets added to a campaign. Let me try giving an example to clarify my statement.

Here's what we expect to happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. The 3 Leads we saw are added to a campaign.

Here's what could actually happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. Four (4) Leads, not 3 Leads as we just saw, are added to a campaign.
4. Return to the report. 4 Leads are now shown, instead of 3.
5. Click Export and complete the export. Five (5) Leads, not 4 Leads, are exported

The cause of this behavior is that when an action is performed on a report, namely Add to Campaign or Export, the report is run again in the background to as part of performing the action. In other words, what we see on the report before we export or add to a campaign can be thought of as a "preview" of what would happen after we perform an action.

In most cases this is probably a non-issue, but I thought the phenomenon was worth noting in the off case that someone is perplexed by an odd discrepancy between a report and a campaign member list or an export file.

Mixing Person Accounts, Contacts and Business Accounts

I really enjoy the excitement of learning new things, especially through active discussion and target questions and answers. One of the subjects that never lets me down in this area is the concept of person accounts in Salesforce.

Having raved about it in previous posts, I feel obliged to answer a question that was posed about how to actually use person accounts and business accounts in the same org.

The answer could be fairly straightforward: In the standard sales processes, there's no need to mentally make a big distinction between the two. Opportunities are tied to accounts, not to contacts. This means that if a salesperson is trying to close a deal, it doesn't matter if the deal is for a person or for another organization. The opportunity is what's important, and it's always related back to the account entity, person or organization, with which you're doing business.

A trickier question which we're running into at work is: What's the best way to handle people who are both your direct customers and who are contacts at other organizations? Theoretically, the idea of linking the contact to both the business account and to the person account would work. In practice, however, I think if an organization is investing time and energy into this level of constituent mapping, then it would be worthwhile to analyze the business needs and maybe setup some workflow, Apex and Visualforce to take advantage of the data links.

Not to dodge the question entirely, but I think that there are always specific organizational needs that drive people to setup more complex and complete data models. If anyone's interested in discussing a specific use case, I'd be totally game!

The Ingenuity of Person Accounts

As I meditated more on the idea in my previous post about people's connections to different accounts, a surprising realization occurred to me: We don't even have to engineer a new object; Salesforce has already done this for us! And the answer is... Person Accounts!

The basic implementation can be done in two simple steps:

1. Activate the Person Accounts feature.
2. Create Person_Account__c as a Lookup(Account) field on the Contact object

Conceptually, the idea is simple: The person is the core piece of the puzzle. Take John Doe, for example. John can be a contact for Acme Corporation and simultaneously be a contact for Zenith, Inc. All that's needed to represent these relationships are a person account record for John, two business account records for Acme and Zenith, and two contact records to link John to the two accounts.

Although I haven't thought this next idea in much more depth, I have an inkling that this model could potentially even replace the Nonprofit Starter Pack's Household object with a "Household Account" record type. Wouldn't that be a beautiful alignment of developer resources? All of Salesforce's main development efforts on Contacts and Accounts could then directly benefit all users in every industry. No more waiting for updates to the NPSP Householding package; just wait for the next seasonal release of Salesforce.

People, Not Contacts and Affiliations, Are the Way to Go

Poking around the nonprofit space today, I came across the Affiliations for the Nonprofit Starter Pack app on the AppExchange. I installed it, and all it ended up doing was creating a new object called Affiliation that links contacts with accounts. Ugh... I sense a very unpleasant asymmetry here, where a contact record can be related to an account either directly through the Account field or through an affiliation record sandwiched between the contact and another account.

While this structure definitely works to get us through most of our work, is this really the right way forward? If people at the Saleforce Foundation are pouring time and energy into developing something for the greater good, wouldn't it be great if we are assured that their focus is on the right vision?

Regarding affiliations, I don't think the Affiliation object is the right vision.

Here's a thought: Contacts were originally defined as people of interest related to an organization. Somehow, we diverged from this model by redefining contacts as people with a primary connection to a specific organization via the Lookup(Account) field. What's the difference, you ask? The difference is that in the original definition, a Contact record is the link between a person and an account; in the world with Affiliation as a junction between Contact and Account, we've redefined a Contact as the person, which it was never meant to be.

So, by introducing the Affiliation object, we've bastardized the idea of a "contact". How do we pick which Contact record stays with its account? How do we choose between a creating new Contact record and creating an Affiliation record? Is it better to have my Contact record as a child of account A with an affiliation to account B, or the other way around?

The answer: For orgs that want to map out people's relationships to different Account records, introduce the Person object. Then, link every Contact record to the appropriate Person record, and you have the magic sauce that paints the real picture of a person and his or her affiliations.

Lead and Contact Merge Fields in Email Templates

Interesting note about Lead and Contact merge fields in Salesforce email templates: Some of the fields will populate regardless of whether the record is of the correct type.

For example, in my template, the first line read:

Dear {!Contact.FirstName}{!Lead.FirstName},

I figured that only one of the two fields would actually produce the target's first name. However, when I actually tested the merge fields in Salesforce with a Contact record and with a Lead record, in both instances the result read:

Dear JohnJohn,

Interestingly, this duplicate merge did not occur in the signature, where I had the following:

Sincerely,
{!Contact.OwnerFullName}{!Lead.OwnerFullName}

In the signature, only the relevant OwnerFullName field was populated, depending on whether a Contact or a Lead was selected.

I wonder whether this phenomenon is intentional or indicative of a bug...