A single contact, for Multiple accounts - Possible?

[bareeves]

The need for this comes from mail merge.

We need to search for all accounts on the "west coast"

and say 500 accounts appear.

We now need to mail each account's designated contact, but here is the problem:

Some of these accounts have one individual as the contact.

ie: IBM, 27 offices on west coast, one contact: Mary Smith

How would you keep this data in SFDC so that Mary gets one email or letter from us?

We dont want to send mary 27 emails, (and have mary in the system 27 times) and we dont want to miss sending Mary a mail if the one account she is connected to isnt selected.

How would sfdc handle this?

Tks in advance!

[Stevemo]

You can do this by using Account Contact Roles

[bareeves]

OK! i see how this would work.

SO then i would need to create a report to pull account and contact role?

I see there is a seperate object for Account and contact role - is this what this is for? Mail merges?

Tks

[Stevemo]

Yes, and Account Contact Role report should give you're looking for.  

It's not typically used for Mail Merges, the Account and Opportunity Contact Roles are used to identify/designate a specific role that a person plays on that particular Account/Opportunity.  

So for example, there might be only 1 Moe Howard from The 3 Stooges, but he may have roles on several different Accounts and/or Opportunities.  You don't need to create multiple "Moe Howards" you just need to link the 1 Contact to any Account or Opportunity he is involved with.  

[graphical]

Thanks for this suggestion. Anybody know if a contact can have two roles? So, for instance, I have a contact who is the Champion at an account, but they also serve as the evaluator (a specific role we have for folks who administer proofs of concept). Can we do that?

[Stevemo]

Yes, that's exactly how it works

[graphical]

Whoops. I wasn't clear. I meant two roles on the same opportunity. Turns out that you can by making two links. Now, is there any way to modify the opportunity block on the contact so that you can filter for what you want, such as roles in active opportunities?

thanks, John