Count the number of contacts on an account in Salesforce

How many personas / contacts are identified on each target account and is your team following best practice? We share a great solution to keep track!‍

If you run an account based sales process you'll likely have a defined set of buyer personas under each targeted account.

A metric I've always wanted to track as sales ops leader was account penetration VS activity, read on to see how you can set this up in a few minutes.

Why do I need this?

Frequency and recency of last activity data is often skewed by marketing automation and cannot really tell you if your team have identified and are reaching out to all of your personas within an account.

The problem is...

There's no standard way to create a formula field to count number of associated contacts on an account in Salesforce and most solutions require some fiddly apex triggers and custom coding.

Fortunately, there's an easy and free alternative way of accomplishing this with clicks not code using the free Rollup Helper app on the Salesforce Appexchange.

Okay, let's do this.

Install the app and navigate to the app launcher and launch the Rollup Helper app then select "Create a new rollup" to begin.

Select the destination object, in this case it is the account object we're interested in and then select the target field and either select an existing field or create a custom number field on your account object:
#contacts_at_account__c

Select 'Contact' as the child object and 'Account ID - Contact.AccountId' as the relationship field.

Set the roll up type to count, open up the advanced configuration and select 'Overwrite Existing Target Field Information'. This just ensures you get zeros in the blank values instead of null values should you wish.

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