Galvin’s Favorite Flows: Matching Contact and Account Owners Automatically

It finally happened. You landed the big one. That target customer you’ve been working on for months. Now it’s time to execute. Unfortunately, bad Salesforce record management puts the brakes on driving forward. Hundreds of contacts for the new client accumulated along the way show many different owners except for the most important one—the person responsible for the customer’s account. While updating the records may not seem like a top priority, trouble may be just ahead. Bad data can mean bad service. The good news is that one of Galvin’s Favorite Flows creates a process for automatically matching Contact and account owners . 

By default, the individual who creates a record in Salesforce becomes its owner. So, while a business manager may own the customer account record in Salesforce, the individual contact records under that account belong to the various people who built them. For users creating contact records, they must manually assign the new record to the account owner. Odds are they frequently skip this step or simply forget to do it. 

What may seem like a minor issue can create major process challenges. Potential problems include misassigning leads, missing alerts, duplicating accounts, difficulty tracking productivity, and generating inaccurate data just to name a few. 

With this Galvin Favorite Flow for matching contact and account owners , two separate automations fix the issue. The first automation checks that a newly created contact record owner equals the account owner. If the validation check shows false, the system automatically makes the update—even before the record is saved. Salesforce’s Spring ’20 release introduced before-save updates in flows, which makes this possible. Creating or updating a record auto launches the flow for additional updates prior to writing the record to the database. Before-save updates in flows are 10 times faster than record-changes built through Process Builder. 

The second automation updates the contact owner when an account owner is changed. The configuration setup ensures the automation runs asynchronously avoiding any issues when reassigning accounts en masse. Setting up the automation is simple for orgs with less than 1,000 contacts per account. For orgs consistently exceeding that amount, the automation still applies, but requires Apex to manage the updates. 

This Favorite Flow also helps in other ways. The automation addresses a limitation of Salesforce’s Mass Transfer Records feature. When moving an account to a new owner, only contacts owned by the existing account owner are transferred. All other contacts for that account require manual updates or a data import to reassign. That is a problem for contacts owned by inactive users because they cannot be updated until they are reassigned to someone active. Our flow eliminates all the extra work automatically. Aligning the contact and account owner also ensures that marketing automation tracks campaign data and issues notifications correctly. That level of marketing intelligence feeding to the right person proves powerful in meeting business goals. 

We love this matching contact and account owners flow because it reduces manual work, cleans up records, and saves time. Bad data should never ruin a big deal. This Favorite Flow ensures that a record, and its information, automatically goes to its rightful owner—faster and easier than ever. 

For more ways Galvin helps clients “go with the Flow,” check out our other Favorite Flows or reach out with a process you need simplified. 

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