Get Started with Stakeholder Management

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Discuss why stakeholder modeling is important in the automotive industry.
  
• Show how to use accounts and contacts in Automotive Cloud.
  
• Explain how internal organizational units and business profiles are used in Automotive Cloud.
  

Before You Start

Before you start this module, consider completing the following recommended content.

• Automotive Cloud Foundations
  

Why Is Stakeholder Modeling Important?

It’s critical for today’s automotive companies to capture and manage essential data for all their stakeholders and accounts. Successful companies assess and share comprehensive information about the individuals and entities involved in each stage of the automotive journey.

Stakeholder modeling is the process of establishing relationships between the different types of stakeholders in an organization. With Automotive Cloud, you can capture, store, and analyze data about all entities and their relationships. Entities include the business profiles, households, and the organizational structure of your dealer groups, customers, and suppliers.

But why is stakeholder modeling such a big deal in the automotive industry?

Optimized relationships: Automotive Cloud equips you to visualize complex relationships between multiple parties, so you can tailor subscriptions, warranty terms, and services based on this knowledge. And with components like relationship cards and relationship graphs, you can efficiently navigate and manage the intricate web of connections within the automotive industry.

Targeted marketing journeys: To thrive in today’s competitive landscape, it’s essential to have a holistic view of your customers and the different groups and households they relate to. Instead of generic mass marketing, dealers can tailor their communications to the specific needs and preferences of each customer and those related to them. This results in more effective marketing campaigns and higher conversion rates.

Key moments and milestones: Every customer goes through various life events that affect their automotive needs, like starting a family, moving home, or retiring from a career. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and dealers who are aware of these key moments can proactively engage with customers by offering tailored solutions at the right time. For instance, by providing special offers on a family-sized SUV to a customer who’s expecting a child.

In this module, follow Neo Motors and Dream Dealers on their Automotive Cloud implementation journey.

It All Starts with Accounts and Contacts

Accounts and contacts are the building blocks of stakeholder modeling in Automotive Cloud. To model individual people, like drivers and technicians, use person accounts. For organizations, such as dealerships and banks, use business accounts.

Neo Motors creates a person account for everyone who isn’t affiliated with a household or group. Examples are legal advisors, claim experts, and service providers. For its dealers, Neo Motors creates a business account with a contact record for each agent, representative, and executive associated with its dealership. A key takeaway is that person accounts function as contact records, while business accounts can have multiple contacts.

Take a look at some accounts created by Neo Motors to model different people and businesses.

Automotive Cloud comes with unique objects and processes that extend the account and contact objects so Neo Motors can visualize lots of different relationships.

Organizational Units at Neo Motors

Neo Motors works with multiple sales and service dealerships. The first job in stakeholder modeling is to organize dealer accounts into groups based on location or service type. For example, a company can group all sales dealerships into an internal organization unit and all service dealerships into a service unit. Another way is to group all dealer accounts by country.

Neo Motors chooses to group all dealerships into four regions. Here's a graphic that shows how the different dealerships of Dream Dealers USA are modeled as accounts and the internal organization units are tracked by region.

To group the dealerships, the company creates a parent Account record for Dream Dealers USA and associates all dealerships in each major city as child accounts of the parent regional unit, such as the North USA Dream Dealers Group. Next, the territory managers relate all child accounts to one of the four separate regions.

Here's a table that lists each organizational unit record with the associated account, organization name, and code.

The example screen shows an organizational unit record for the South USA Dream Dealers Group.

Organizing accounts allows for streamlined reporting, accurate target-setting for territory managers, and focused regional marketing strategies among dealerships in the same region.

Business Profiles

In Automotive Cloud, an account can represent a subsidiary, dealer, customer, supplier, or service provider. For a more comprehensive account view, use business profiles.

The table lists the business profile details for three different Neo Motors accounts.

You can create business profiles for customer, supplier, dealer, and other partner accounts.

Downstream processes such as appointment scheduling, inventory management, and incentive management can use the data stored in business profiles.

In the next unit, discover how to model stakeholders related to a vehicle’s lifecycle and internal users.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Create Internal Organizational Units in Automotive Cloud
• Salesforce Help: Create Business Profiles in Automotive Cloud