How to Deal with Changes to a Contact’s Account and Title in Salesforce
On average, people in the United States hold 11.3 different jobs from ages 18 to 46 years. Now, unless every Contact in your Salesforce org is like Hy Goldman (who recently celebrated 73 years at the same company), then you’ve probably run into the problem of keeping track of these job changes in Salesforce.
Unfortunately, Salesforce does not track these changes out of the box, so you’re on your own to come up with a solution. A few workarounds to deal with this issue include:
- Creating a No Longer at Company checkbox on the Contact object
- Editing the Contact’s name and appending NOT EMPLOYED
- Creating a new Contact
None of these ways were ideal. At Internet Creations, we did not want to deal with the consequences associated with each of these options, so we asked our developers to come up with a better solution.
The free and easy way to manage changes to a Contact’s Account
Former Positions tracks changes to a Contact’s Account and Title, enabling you to retain activity history and follow an individual’s career. This solution is conceptually similar to what LinkedIn provides in the Experience section of a profile.
Former Positions received recognition from Salesforce MVP, Phil Walton, at Dreamforce ’14 by being named one of the best free app on the AppExchange. Hear what Phil had to say about Former Positions during his Dreamforce presentation.
The setup is as simple as editing your Account and Contact page layouts and creating a new “bucket” Account for inactive Contacts. On Accounts, you’ll see past employees (Contacts), and from a Contact detail page, you’ll see past employers (Accounts).
Activity history can be retained and data quality improved by moving inactive Contacts to the bucket Account you created (for example, Whereabouts Unknown). Optionally, any time the Account or Title on a Contact record is modified, a Former Position record can be automatically inserted.
Try Former Positions for free today by visiting the AppExchange!
