Treatment of Account Families
Account families describe the relationship between different business entities or specific sites within a corporate family. When one business entity has financial or legal responsibility for another business, it creates a headquarters for the subsidiary relationship. These relationships are shown in the data using three fields, which are used in the treatment and viewing of account families across all designers in the Design Module.
- Account ID - gives an account at a specific location a unique identifier.
- Parent Account ID - indicates the parent entity for the account.
- Ultimate Parent ID - indicates the account at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, owning all of the subsidiaries.
Handling Account Families While Creating Territories
While creating territories in the Territory Designer, you will see the account families menu. This pop-up establishes the treatment of account families, where you can specify one of the three options when creating a hierarchy node.
Scope of Considered Accounts
Please note that when creating segment hierarchies from the parent, ONLY the records belonging to a family that is associated with that parent are considered. If you have accounts belonging to the same family in other nodes within the hierarchy, they are not considered for the treatment described below.
Option 1: Don't Reassign Children to the Same Segment
This option simply ignores any family relationships and matches all the accounts based on the specified segment hierarchy rule (e.g. unique values or buckets). In this case, all the accounts, irrespective of account family will be matched and any record matching the rules will be assigned to the respective matching segment.
Option 2: Assign All Children to the Same Segment
When this option is selected, the parent account is evaluated against the rules and IF there are any child accounts directly related to the children (as identified by the Parent Account ID field), they will be moved to the segment where the parent will be assigned to. The scope includes not only the direct children but also the entire children hierarchy under that parent.
Siblings Without Parents
Please note that with the above option, only the children of the parents that are matched will be moved with the parent. If a parent account is not available in the selected segment, each sibling will be individually evaluated against the segment hierarchy criteria and assigned independently.
Option 3: Assign Children to a Parent that Meets a Criteria
This option functions in the same way as the option above, but has one critical difference in that it allows you to create specific criteria for the children to determine if they qualify to be moved with the parent.
This scenario is usually common in situations where you might want to keep all accounts belonging to an account family within a particular region (e.g. all US accounts of a family), but want to independently evaluate the child accounts based on their own merit.
How many territories to make?
Try to keep the number of territories created within a manageable number by selecting the correct field and type options in the account families menu. Go back to Creating and Managing Hierarchies for a review if needed. When creating segments with specific criteria assigned for children's accounts, it's easy to fill out the primary field as what you are looking to segment for, but make sure that you are not creating unique values for high numbers of records as it will only crowd your segment hierarchy.