Help needed - moving over from Salesforce. Account/Contact linkage solution?

Hi! I’m thinking about making the case to my company that we should switch over fully from Salesforce to Monday, since for us, SF just acts as a contact dump, rather than an interactive system we use on a day to day basis.

The main problem I’m having is envisioning a way to link multiple contacts to an account. I’m thinking of having one Contact Database board, with two groups: Accounts & Contacts. For example, if I have an Account, like a company, and I have various staff members of that Account/Company as Contacts, is there a way I can somehow link those contact items to another item that is an Account?

Secondly, I want to be able to link any occurrence/appearance of these contacts or accounts across my boards and workspaces BACK TO my Contact Database board. I want to make sure there’s a centralized place I can aggregate information on all these accounts and contacts, even if I’m accumulating that data in different boards.

I’m thinking that the tags function will allow me to do this. I could assign every Account a unique tag (there will be 1000+, can Monday.com support that many tags??), and assign that same tag to all relevant contacts. And then for all other boards where contacts or accounts appear, I can use a VLookup column based on the item name (is that possible?) that will display the associated tag. Then when I click on or search for that tag, all the relevant actors and info will show up across my whole Monday.com, right?

Does that sound viable? It will take a lot of manual labor to create and assign all those tags.

Has anyone else figured out a method to do this? What else have you tried?

Hi Colleen. Christa from monday.com here.

This is a great use case and I can see a few different ways you could map this out across your monday.com platform. One consideration would be to have a high level board that consists of Accounts and a low level board that consists of the Contact Database and then using the connect boards and mirror columns to link the two boards. Across different boards, you can then make a connect boards column and mirror the account level item OR mirror the relevant contact information like name and email to a contact related item from the Contact Database board.

Another way to think about this if you want to keep everything in one board is to use the item level as the account and use subitems to break out the unique contacts for each account. Third option would be to use the Groups as the Account Name, Items as the Contacts associated with that group, and tags as the Account Name again. There are pros and cons to each of these workflows. One question I have for you: what is the size of your current contact database?

As far as your tags solution, I do think using Tags as #ClientName is a great organization tool to check from a bottom up level that mirrored columns are being used across different boards. You can use the Search Everything feature on the left hand tool bar to search across boards and aggregate all associated tags so that you do not have to spend time building a Vlookup column. For creating the tags to save you time, you can rely on the Batch Action feature allowing you to update tags in bulk.

As you consider these options, please take some time to read through the below resources:

Interested to hear your thoughts and happy to continue to collaborate over this thread.

Warmly,
Christa

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