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 to the subsidiary relationship. These relationships are shown in the data with three fields:
Account ID: Gives an account at a specific location a unique identifier.
Parent Account ID: Indicates the parent entity for the account.
Ultimate Parent ID: Indicates the account at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, which owns all of the subsidiaries.
Note
Account families with good data quality will give better results. The account hierarchies policy creates and maintains account families and account hierarchy. The policies works in conjunction with the territory plan to ensure tight integration between coverage design and the execution policies.
Options to treat account families
When you create territories or move accounts from one node to another, select how account families are treated from the available options. Each option checks against a specific field to move or assign territories to the appropriate segment.
Do not reassign child accounts to the same segment
Description
Excludes any family relationships and matches all the accounts based on the specified segment hierarchy rule (unique values or buckets). All the accounts, regardless of account family will be matched and any record that matches the rules will be assigned to the respective segment.
Identifying field
None
Use case
You need to route accounts based on where they are and what they do, rather than who owns them.
Assign all child accounts to the same segment
Description
The parent account is evaluated against the rules and if there are any child accounts directly related to the children (identified by the Parent Account ID), they will be moved to the segment where the parent will be assigned to. The scope includes not only the direct children but also the entire children hierarchy under that parent.
When you create territories: Only the children of the parents that are matched will be moved with the parent. If a parent account is not available in the selected segment, each child account is individually evaluated against the segment hierarchy criteria and assigned independently.
When you move accounts: Only the parents and related child accounts within the source node are considered. All children outside the source node will not be considered for the move.
Identifying field
parentId
Use case
You need to route accounts based on who owns them rather than where the individual branches are located.
Assign child accounts that match the following criteria to the same segment as the parent
Description
The parent account is evaluated against the rules and specific criteria (identified by the Parent Account ID field and added criteria) determines if there are any child accounts that qualify to be moved with the parent.
Click Add Row and select appropriate fields to add criteria.
When you create territories: Select the correct field and type options in the account families menu to keep the number of territories created within a manageable number. When you create segments with specific criteria assigned for children accounts, it's easy to fill out the primary field as segmentation criteria, but it is important to make sure not to create unique values for high numbers of records as it will only crowd the segment hierarchy.
Identifying field
parentId
Use case
You need to keep all accounts that belong to an account family within a particular region (all US accounts of a family), but want to independently evaluate the child accounts based on specific criteria.
Group all accounts belonging to the same corporate family into one segment
Description
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 (identified by the Ultimate Parent ID field). This option can be used in cases where you are missing the parent or some parent data.
Identifying field
ultimateParentId
Use case
You need to route accounts based on collective presence and majority volume, ensuring a corporate family stays together even when your parent account data is missing or incomplete.