Account and Contact Management
Accounts and contacts are the shared foundation every other sales object hangs from, so their design decisions ripple into sharing, reporting and duplication. Know the standard account model: Business Accounts with related contacts, Person Accounts where the individual is the account (common in B2C and wealth management; enabling it is largely irreversible and changes contact behavior), and the account hierarchy (Parent Account) used for roll-ups and large enterprise structures.
Contacts belong to accounts; Contact Roles on opportunities record who plays which part (decision maker, influencer, technical buyer), while Contact to Multiple Accounts lets one person relate to several accounts directly. Account Teams grant record access and visibility for overlay staff without role-hierarchy changes; Opportunity Teams and Opportunity Splits do the same for deal credit.
Access questions are constant: organization-wide defaults set the baseline, the role hierarchy opens records upward, and sharing rules, teams or manual sharing open them horizontally. Duplicate management (matching rules plus duplicate rules, with alert or block actions) is where data quality is enforced, and the Account Merge tool consolidates records while moving related data.
Traps: assuming the account owner automatically sees every opportunity on the account (it depends on opportunity OWD and sharing); confusing the account owner with the opportunity owner; forgetting that Person Accounts merge contact and account fields and complicate reporting on contacts; enabling Person Accounts late in a project.
Worked example: a matrixed enterprise where a global account manager owns the account but regional reps own opportunities - set Opportunity OWD to Private, use the role hierarchy for the manager, and add Opportunity Teams for shared visibility rather than widening the default.
Rule of thumb: use teams and sharing for access, and contact roles for influence - never widen OWD to solve a visibility request.