Setting Relationships Between Contacts

Learning Objectives

After completing this topic, you'll be able to:

• Set the reporting relationships between contacts
• Show the informal power between contacts (influence)
• Show negative relationships between contacts (conflict)
• Move contacts to where you want them in the layout
• Remove contacts from the map

Lynn is an account executive working for Riley Retail Solutions. She's doing discovery on a new account called Oriole Health & Fitness, a chain of health food and sports equipment outlets.

She and her revenue team are building the account's relationship map.

Set a Reporting Relationship

When you add contacts to a relationship map, they're automatically arranged into the reporting structure specified in Salesforce. This can save a lot of time.

Each contact is connected to their manager by a gray line, if their manager is also on the map.

In the case of Lynn's map, some reporting relationships need to be set manually. For example, Wendy McGraw reports to Ian James, and this needs to be reflected on the map.

Lynn simply drags Wendy's card onto Ian's card. This positions Wendy below Ian, and a gray line now connects them.

(This also sets Ian as Wendy’s manager in Salesforce.)

Finally, Carrie Dreyfuss's manager is not set at the moment, so she's not connected to anyone.

However, Lynn knows that Carrie's manager is Karl Winters, so she knows performs the same action for Carrie.

Show Influence

Emilie Gutierrez, the Enablement Manager, has a history of leading successful projects sponsored by the CCO Ian James. As a result, Ian greatly values her opinion.

So Lynn decides to add an influence line from Emilie to Ian. That way, anyone looking at the map will know straight away that Emilie has this influence on Ian. This will prompt the team to think about ways to leverage Emilie's influence.

Lynn selects Emilie's Add Influence option. Then she selects Ian's card to add a green influence line between Emilie and Ian.

Influence flows in nontraditional directions. Lynn and her team know that influence often flows from the lower ranks in an organization. They'll pay close attention to this kind of influence, and try to leverage it.

For example, Lynn knows that April Redmond, the CFO, worked with Gareth Murphy, the new data operations specialist, at a previous company, and she has very high regard for his technical expertise. She'll seek out Gareth's advice in her capacity as approver of the use of budget.

Lynn adds an influence line from Gareth to April.

In addition, Jane Anderson, one of Lynn's colleagues on her revenue team, has discovered that the external consultant Dave Clifton will be working closely with Lara King, the Digital Operations Manager. Jane opens the relationship map and adds an influence line from Dave to Lara to indicate that he'll have a direct impact on Lara's thinking.

There are now three influence lines on the map.

Show Conflicts

Lynn heard that there's some personal friction between Carrie Dreyfuss, the purchasing coordinator, and Gareth Murphy, the data operations specialist.

The friction might impair the way they work together and share information, so this is something that everyone on Lynn's team needs to be aware of and strategize for. For example, they may need to double-check that Gareth has shared with Carrie all the information he received in conversations with Riley Retail Solutions, and vice versa.

Lynn decides to add a conflict line between Gareth and Carrie.

She selects Gareth's Add Conflict option. Then she selects Carrie's card to add a red conflict line between them.

(She could also have selected Carrie's Add Conflict option. Unlike influence relationships, a conflict is mutual and so does not have a direction.)

Move Contacts to Where You Want Them in the Layout

You can move contacts left and right along the row they belong to on your map. Or, to put it another way, you can change the horizontal order of the contacts who report to a particular manager.

Lynn prefers to keep contacts who work closely together in close proximity on the map.

So she wants to place Jo Masterson beside Vice President of Procurement Karl Winters.

Lynn uses Karl's Move Left option to move him across.

Remove a Contact from the Map

Suppose that Lynn finds out that Bruce Pritchard has left Oriole Health & Fitness. She will want to remove Bruce from the map.

To do this, she simply selects Bruce's Remove Contact icon.

(Removing Bruce from the map doesn't affect his contact record in Salesforce, or any other relationship maps he may be on.)

Try It Yourself

You've seen how to represent relationships on the map and how to move contacts to where you want them.

In the previous topic, we suggested that you could start adding contacts to a relationship map. Why not return to that map now and start representing relationships and positioning contacts? You can:

• Set a reporting relationship
• Set an influence relationship
• Set a conflict relationship
• Move contacts to where you want them on the map
• Remove a contact from the map