Account Hierarchy

The Background

Account hierarchy in a CRM gives sales leaders a clear view of how parent companies, subsidiaries, and related entities are structured, so they can better understand organizational relationships. This visibility helps uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities across the entire corporate family, rather than treating accounts in isolation. It also improves reporting and forecasting by rolling up activities, revenue, and pipeline data at both the parent and child account levels.

Customer Calls

We met with three customers before beginning any design or product work who helped us shape the requirements for this feature. Here are some of the quotes from those calls:

“Roll-ups is the key. Data is what we want.”
“We have to make a custom module to keep track of parent accounts and subsidiaries.”
“If your CRM helps you strategize your account strategy, then you’ll want to log in.”
“We user children accounts to represent our billing entities.”
“There is no way to distinguish a parent account versus a child account when searching or filtering.”
“Revenue can be split between accounts and you can’t tell which accounts are more valuable.”
“It would be great to create and edit opportunities from a key account level.”

Competitive Research

Before starting on wireframes and low fidelity mocks, I looked at what other products were providing for hierarchy including CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, as well as non-CRM products like Bob. More text here…

User Flows

After our customer calls, the PM created a feature document with priortized user needs and requirements. I used the document as a starting point for user flows and mocks.

Wireframes and Lo Fi Mocks

After creating user flows, I created wire frames and low fidelity mocks that can be found in the Figma file here.

User Testing

During user testing sessions, I shared with them the first round of mocks here. Talk more…

Final Design & Prototype

After sharing with customers, I iterated on designs and created protoypes that can be found in the Figma file here.