Finding the parent account for a child account in Salesforce is one of the most common tasks in revenue operations. The best tools for finding a parent account are Kernel, Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo, HG Insights, Clay and Traction Complete, and each one serves a different use case.
Corporate hierarchy data is a family tree of a company, showing who it's owned by and who it owns. You can build one by hand from public filings and annual reports to the SEC, one account at a time. For an entire CRM, that's very hard to scale.
Which tool you pick depends on the use case. For credit, compliance or procurement, Dun & Bradstreet has been the historic choice. Even ZoomInfo calls the D&B hierarchy model "the de facto industry standard". ZoomInfo may be better for some go-to-market use cases, especially when contact data is involved. Traction Complete builds and visualises the hierarchy inside Salesforce, using a data source such as D&B.
Being tied to legal entities is limiting for sales teams. It misses go-to-market entities, such as brands and business units, that aren't legal entities but that you could sell to if you had an account executive dedicated to them. Your territories, routing and account roll-ups are built on these. Kernel covers both. It has data for legal entities and go-to-market entities, and it can associate accounts inside your CRM, which builds the corporate hierarchy.
| Tool | Best for | Parent levels returned | ID | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kernel | Hierarchies for territories, routing and roll-ups | Immediate, top, top operating parent | Kernel ID | Salesforce, Clay, Amazon S3 |
| Dun & Bradstreet | Credit, compliance, procurement, legal family trees | Global ultimate, domestic ultimate, parent, headquarters | D-U-N-S Number | Salesforce, Dynamics |
| ZoomInfo | Teams that also buy contact data | Ultimate, domestic, immediate parent | ZoomInfo Company ID | Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics |
| HG Insights | Tech vendors pairing hierarchies with install-base data | Group HQ, corporate, domestic parent | HG ID | Salesforce, HubSpot |
| Traction Complete | Building and viewing hierarchies inside Salesforce | Global ultimate plus custom views | Your provider's IDs | Salesforce only |
| Clay | Hierarchy lookups inside Clay tables | All parents, immediate, ultimate (beta) | Clay company ID | Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics |
Kernel gives you account data for the records inside your CRM or system of record. The first thing it does is run a process called entity resolution, to decide which company each account actually represents. CRM records often have mismatches between fields such as name, LinkedIn and domain. Once an account is resolved, Kernel adds a unique Kernel ID to the record, which ties it back to Kernel's database of account-level data.
For each account Kernel resolves, you get up to three parent accounts. The immediate parent is the company one level up from the account. The top parent is the one at the very top of the tree, for example a holding company. The top operating parent is the highest company in the hierarchy that actually operates a business, as opposed to a passive holding company or investment firm.
YouTube shows why the top operating parent matters. Its immediate parent is Google LLC and its top parent is Alphabet. Alphabet is only really a holding company, so the top operating parent is Google LLC. Berkshire Hathaway is similar. It's the top parent of GEICO, See's Candies and Duracell, but each of those is its own top operating parent. The top operating parent is often the one that's most useful for your territory or roll-ups to point towards.
Kernel can identify the unique regional entities that make up a wider, complex corporate hierarchy, say Oracle in France or Oracle in Spain. These may be entities you can sell to, so you want them separate in your CRM and uniquely identified with an ID. Kernel gives you those entities, and it can also help you associate them to the wider account and link them to their parent.
For each suggestion Kernel makes, such as the parent account of YouTube being Google LLC, there's a reasoning field alongside a confidence rating from high through to low. The reasoning may say, for example, that YouTube's official terms identify Google LLC as the service provider.
The Kernel Platform itself lets you take actions inside your system of record that make your corporate hierarchy data usable. For example, you can associate two accounts within a corporate hierarchy, which creates a link between them in your system of record.
D&B is a corporate hierarchy data provider. It's often used in enterprises where credit checks are important. It's also used in enterprises where legal entities are the foundation of the go-to-market motion. It struggles when go-to-market entities, such as brands or business units that aren't legal entities, are relevant. Dun & Bradstreet has a unique D-U-N-S Number for each company. This is a 9-digit number associated to each one. Each Dun & Bradstreet corporate hierarchy tree has a global ultimate at the top, a domestic ultimate for each relevant country within the hierarchy, and standard parent accounts, which in D&B's definition own more than 50% of another account or company within the hierarchy. In Dun & Bradstreet's world, a link is traditionally set when a company has "a proven legal or financial responsibility" for another. For Salesforce, you can bring Dun & Bradstreet into your CRM with D&B Connect.
Most people know ZoomInfo for their contact-level data. ZoomInfo's hierarchy data comes through its Hierarchy Data Brick, which gives you fields such as the ultimate parent, the domestic parent, the immediate parent and subsidiary accounts. ZoomInfo's hierarchy data is refreshed quarterly. Each company within ZoomInfo has a company ID. In Salesforce, ZoomInfo maps corporate hierarchies to the Parent Account field and to what they call the Ultimate Parent Account field.
HG Insights is best known for technographic data, such as which tools and systems the accounts inside your CRM may use. It also offers corporate hierarchy data. The hierarchy is built with a group HQ at the very top, which is similar to the concept of an ultimate parent and could be a holding company. Then there's a corporate parent, a domestic parent, a site and a subsidiary. HG Insights suggests using the HG ID over the domain itself, because "a domain can be ambiguous". On the CRM side, HG Insights connects to Salesforce through its own managed objects, and there's a native HubSpot connector as well.
Traction Complete is a tool for visualising corporate hierarchies within Salesforce. You need to bring your own data. That could be from something like Dun & Bradstreet, or from any other provider, as long as there's a unique identifier within that provider, such as the D-U-N-S Number or the domain. Traction Complete offers a managed package that builds the hierarchies. You can build different views, such as legal hierarchies, partner hierarchies or go-to-market hierarchies. There's an AI step to link brands and franchises. It's for Salesforce only.
Clay gives you the ability to use a range of corporate hierarchy providers within a Clay table, such as HG Insights and Kernel. Clay has a unique company ID that you can associate to each record. It also gives you the ability to map US operating and brand universes. Clay is weaker for corporate hierarchy coverage outside of the US and doesn't natively offer their own holding versus operating company split. You can use Kernel data within Clay to access that nuance. The Clay ID is persistent, which means that it never changes. You can send the data back to your CRM via Clay.
LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations gives you access to corporate hierarchy associations down to the 8th level for more than 182,000 companies.
OpenCorporates gives you access to more than 30 million relationships pulled from different sources like the SEC and UK Companies House. With that data, you can trace parent chains yourself.
LeanData helps you build the hierarchies within Salesforce from data that you already have access to, such as Dun & Bradstreet. It supports up to 10 hierarchies per organisation.
How you choose which corporate hierarchy data tool to use depends on your use case. If you're worried about credit, compliance or procurement, Dun & Bradstreet has traditionally been used for credit checks and similar use cases. If you want to go for ownership-based hierarchies but have a limited pool of records to sift through, LexisNexis is helpful.
If your primary use case is to build territories for a big sales team, routing pathways for leads to accounts or roll-ups in Salesforce, then it's best to use a tool that returns the operating parent and that can write a parent account directly into Salesforce and build the associations, which is what Kernel does.
If your use case is to visualise corporate hierarchies that you already have data for, then you can use a tool like Traction Complete or LeanData. But you will also go wrong using these tools if the data that feeds them is inaccurate.
If you're looking for a tool that gives you technographic data alongside hierarchies, then you can take a look at HG Insights.
For testing, you could use Clay to test Clay's native corporate hierarchy functionality, or also test a tool like HG Insights or Kernel within Clay via the marketplace.
The best tools for finding a parent account from a child account are tools like Kernel, which has a database of accounts and entities that you can utilize, but also tooling to help make the changes inside your system of record as determined by the database.
You can view a company's corporate hierarchy, including parent and subsidiary relationships, in a tool like Kernel, ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet or Clay.
The top parent is the very top of the legal tree. For example, a holding company or an investment firm in some cases. In contrast, the top operating parent is the highest company within a corporate hierarchy that has day-to-day oversight of a business or operational control of a business. For YouTube, the top parent is Alphabet, whereas the reality is that Google LLC is the entity that actually operates YouTube. So that's why it's the top operating parent.
A holding company technically owns a business legally, but they don't actually really run them day to day. So if you decide to roll up your accounts to the holding company, you'll end up with a situation where you've grouped businesses together where there's really not much similar between them. For example, you wouldn't want to treat GEICO, See's Candies and Duracell as being part of the same account, even though they're owned by Berkshire Hathaway, because they each operate as their own operating company.
The reason that a regional subsidiary should be its own CRM account is that quite often they can be sold to independently of their higher parent within its corporate hierarchy. Within Kernel, you can treat a regional subsidiary as its own entity if it's a real legal entity that shares a brand with its parent account, sits in a different country and serves customers there. For example, Oracle France and Oracle Ibérica in Spain. With Kernel, you can also roll regional subsidiaries into the global account if that's more appropriate for the way that you sell.
Within Kernel, you can update Salesforce's standard Parent Account field. You can also create a new field for the top operating parent.
The way you would check whether the parent-child link or corporate hierarchy is correct is by reviewing the reasoning which Kernel provides behind each association, such as a snippet from an annual report or a quote from a website that states the ownership status of an account or company. Kernel gives you the confidence rating behind the determination as well.
