Contacts

This refers to the individuals working on your accounts with whom you have contact. It mostly contains more personal details such as date of birth, gender, and language. Additionally, it can also contain company details, such as title, department, and, optionally, their relationship to another contact to whom they report. This ReportsToId lookup field is similar to the Parent Account field, and allows you to present a hierarchy between your contacts.

Under normal circumstances, a contact is always directly related to an account. It is possible to mark the account lookup as non-required, but when a contact is not associated with an account, then it becomes a private contact instead. Private contacts are only visible to the record owner and system administrators, and cannot be shared with others.

For marketing purposes, it is important to avoid duplicates between contacts; however, what if the same contact plays a role on multiple accounts?

For this specific reason, Salesforce introduced a new feature called Contacts to Multiple Accounts. This feature is disabled by default, but you can enable it through Setup | Feature Settings | Sales | Account Settings:

Once enabled, the related list, related account, and related contact details will need to be added to your respective contact's and account's page layouts. You can remove the standard contact's related list from the account page layout because the new related list contains both the direct and indirect contacts or accounts.

Each contact will still have one direct account through account lookup, but you will be able to create extra relationships with other accounts by adding a new Account Contact Relationship. These will automatically be marked as indirect. However, because these relationships are with another specific object in the Salesforce database, the individual will only exist once in the contact table, which is fantastic news for your marketing department.