I am implementing Salesforce for a company I work for and we need to have the following functionality:
From a Campaign, we call a segment of the market (example: IT companies). Because we only know the company names and other data, we do not know who to call. Because of this, we create the companies as Accounts in Salesforce.
When running a Campaign, we need to be able to add those Accounts to the Campaign so our Account managers know who to call. As they go, they get in touch with people at those Accounts and will add them as Contacts. The goal of the Account managers is to arrange a meeting with our Client. We will open an Activity for each Contact to track progress with that.
We then track the succes of the Campaign based on the Activities that are being completed (status = Meeting).
From what I've gathered, there's a few different approaches I can take:
- Create a custom object for our campaigns and add accounts to that. (How would I add a list of related Accounts to my custom object?)
- Somehow set the Accounts as a custom field/list in the exisiting Campaigns?
- Work differently altogether (what would be the preffered way to do so?)
I appreciate any and all answers that could point me in the right direction.
Best Answer
You should really consider using Alex and Berg suggestions.
If you really want to use accounts, then you can create a Junction Object between account and campaign and use that to track the relationship. That object can have other fields so you can track status or even type of relationship (say you want to relate target accounts, but also Partner accounts).