Seeking Advice on Consolidating Duplicate Accounts in Salesforce for RevOps

Bidisa M. How do you find out these accounts are duplicated? How many duplicate accounts or % of accounts are duplicates?

Bidisa M.: Hey Bidisa, I'm happy to connect. I worked at Salesforce in Sales Ops for 5 years. Can you clarify what you mean by duplicate accounts and what you are trying to do by consolidating all of these into one? Are you trying to consolidate all accounts under a PE or a group of companies into one?

So to clarify- We have an account that's an Investment Firm - could be a prospect currently. We are trying to sell 4 products to them:

Essentially, all 4 of these are different reps (from SDRs to AEs to CSMs), different close dates, different billing cycles, different churn dates if churned. Rather than having 4 different accounts for these, we want to build towards a future where we have all of these on one account but we’re easily able to identify data based on which product(s) are sold to the account. Then, if we sold only Fund Admin to them, we’d want to still identify that they're a “prospect” when it comes to Cap table, for example. I'm just curious of how companies with multi products and multi sales teams set up their account instance. Does that make more sense?? It’s pretty complex and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it 😅

Multi Select Field containing:

And if it makes sense, add these:

You should have a deal for each of the instances above, if they win, you'd have a trigger updating the multi-select field. If they churn, which I think would be captured on the Opportunity*, you would show the churn date there. Or you could set up a Custom Object but that feels like overkill unless you need to capture information that is not found on the Opportunity*.

Bidisa M. a more complete (and more complex) setup that I've used is to create a custom object "Product Interest" which has a 1:many relationship with Account. Product Interest would be a "junction object" between an Account and the Product2 object in Salesforce (assuming Product2 has been correctly configured and maintained.) An Account can have zero or many Product Interest records

These records can be maintained by Salesforce flow or via something externally (your data orchestration tool of choice, Workato, or Airflow if you have a data eng. team) like so:

Most people just keep one Account record and add product-specific status fields (e.g. Fund Admin: Active, Cap Table: Prospect). ​Then you just run separate Opportunities for each product so the different reps and billing cycles stay separated. It keeps the data clean in one place without having to deal with four different accounts for the same firm. You could introduce custom UI compoments that allow to view accounts that didn't already buy X product (thus not needing extending / maintaining account field extensions) Also, I have a nice deduplication tool flying around somewhere. If interested feel free to DM.