Identify The Primary Contact On An Account

Problem

It is often times essential to identify a primary contact or specific "role" within an account. This may be for support or sales reasons. You may want to identify the primary contact's email address or other key piece of contact information and have it accessible to workflow, other business processes, or simply to just display the information/primary contact at the account level. Let's say you have a picklist field or checkbox field that denotes a contact as being the primary contact on an account. How do you populate a contact lookup on the account page that identifies who this contact is?

Solution

Create a rollup which will populate the contact Id into a lookup field. We have coined this as a "Lookup Rollup."

The first step is to create a new custom field (using Lookup as the data type) on the Account object. You can name the field, "Contact ID."

• Select Account as the Destination Object
• Select Contact ID as the Target field
• Select Contact as the child Object
• Use the standard AccountId relationship field
• Select Text Separated By as the rollup Type
• Select Contact ID as the source field
• Create a new Filter:
  • Step 1, Name the filter (e.g. Primary Contact) and set the rollup Limit to 1
  • Step 2 is optional: If you can have multiple primary contacts on your record, using the sort order functionality to change which contact is picked first. You might use created date, or last modified date for example.
  • Step 3 is where you add a criteria that establishes how to identify the primary contact. This is different for every company. In this example, we are filtering on a Primary Contact checkbox field shown in the screen shot.
    
  • Save the filter

• Save and Run your rollup.
  

EXTRA CREDIT:

• Add formula fields to display primary contact information on the account page like primary contact's phone number or title.
• Use flow to identify when a prospect becomes a customer, and send an email to the primary contact thanking them for their order or introducing them to someone.
• If you use Opportunity Contact Roles and have a role of "Decision Maker" or "Primary," use that as criteria to automatically mark a contact as primary at the contact level. Thus, all these rollups fire from the Opportunity Contact Roles related list and you minimize data entry for your users.

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