Treatment of Account Families Overview

Account families describe the relationship between different business entities or specific sites within a corporate family. When one business entity has financial or legal responsibility for another business, it creates a headquarters for the subsidiary relationship. These relationships are shown in the data using three fields.

1. Account ID - gives an account at a specific location a unique identifier.
2. Parent Account ID - indicates the parent entity for the account.
3. Ultimate Parent ID - indicates the account at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, owning all of the subsidiaries.

Handling Account Families While Creating Territories

Every time you create a hierarchy in a territory plan, you can select one of the four options below (see Figure 1) to determinate how to handle account families within that node.

Notes on how the functionality works:

• Each segment gets its own selection for account families. That is, you can select different options for top-level segments and lower-level segments.
• When specifying account family treatment, it only applies to accounts that are within that segment. If you have accounts belonging to the same family in other segments within the hierarchy, they are not considered for the treatment described below.

Option 1: Do not reassign child accounts to the same segment

This option simply ignores any family relationships and matches all the accounts based on the specified segment hierarchy rule (e.g. unique values or buckets). In this case, all accounts will be evaluated and assigned to segments based solely on their own firmographic or other data.

Option 2: Assign all child accounts to the same segment

When this option is selected, the parent account is evaluated against the rules and IF there are any child accounts directly related to the children (as identified by the Parent Account ID field), they will be moved to the segment where the parent will be assigned. The scope includes not only the direct children but also the entire corporate family under that parent.

NOTE: Siblings Without Parents

Please note that with the above option, only the children of the parents that are in the same hierarchy level segment will follow the parent. If a parent account is not available in the selected segment, each sibling will be individually evaluated against the segment hierarchy criteria and assigned independently.

Option 3: Assign child accounts that match the following criteria to the same segment as the parent

This option functions in the same way as the option above but has one critical difference in that it allows you to create specific criteria for the children to determine if they qualify to be moved with the parent.

This scenario is usually common in situations where you might want to keep all accounts belonging to an account family within a particular region (e.g. all US accounts of a family) but want to independently evaluate other child accounts based on their own merit.

Option 4: Group all accounts belonging to the same corporate family into one segment

This option allows subsidiaries to stay together regardless of whether a parent is in the segment. It assigns all the subsidiary accounts in that level to the territory where the majority of them would be assigned. This option can be used in cases where you are missing the parent or some parent data.

Example Scenario

• Level 1: Geographic Rule - AMER, APAC, EMEA, LATAM - you select Option 1, so that all accounts get assigned to the region that they would belong in geographically.
• Level 2: Bucket Rule - AMER - Enterprise, Mid Market, SMB Segments - you select Option 2, where typically, the Enterprise territory would get all the subsidiaries of a given parent. Alternatively, you could select Option 3 to say that child accounts that have a certain revenue amount would follow the parent.
• Level 3: Geographic Rule - AMER-Mid-Market - East and West Rep Territories - you select Option 4 so that wherever the critical mass of subsidiaries would end up is where all the subsidiaries go.

How many territories to make?

Try to keep the number of territories created within a manageable number by selecting the correct field and type options in the account families menu. When creating segments with specific criteria assigned for children's accounts, it's easy to fill out the primary field as what you are looking to segment for, but make sure that you are not creating unique values for high numbers of records as it will only crowd your segment hierarchy.