How to Implement Contact Heat Maps in Salesforce
Discover How to Use Contact Mapping in Salesforce to Power Smarter Sales Relationships
Last updated March 13, 2026
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Contact heat maps in Salesforce help you track key stakeholders, a challenge that can be particularly challenging in large customer organizations. Often, multiple voices shape decisions, and working out where to focus your time can be tricky. Contact mapping in Salesforce provides clarity by laying everything out in a simple, visual format. Now, you can see immediately who holds influence, who's supportive, and where the most significant risks may be.
When you use a sales account mapping tool like GSP Account Planner, building contact heat maps in Salesforce becomes effortless. With intuitive drag and drop features, 5 color-coded categories, and the ability to use every piece of contact data, your sales teams can focus on the relationships that matter most to move deals forward.
Your Guide to Contact Heat Maps in Salesforce
How to Visualize Sales Relationships Using Contact Heat Maps
What Is A Contact Heat Map?
A contact heat map in Salesforce is a visual sales mapping tool. It helps sales and account management teams to assess their relationships with decision-makers and influencers in a customer organization. By mapping influence and relationship strength, it clearly shows who supports your deals and where engagement is needed.
Example: Contact Heat Mapping in Salesforce
Here's an example of a contact heat map in Salesforce, created with GSP Account Planner.
The contact heat map has 2 critical dimensions:
- Likelihood To Recommend
- Influence
The framework enables us to build a complete picture of the roles played by various stakeholders in the customer organization and the extent to which each person is positively disposed toward you.
We'll explain in more detail how contact heat maps in Salesforce work, including what the colors mean, but for now, let's evaluate why we should use one.
Why Use A Contact Heat Map in Salesforce?
Contact mapping in Salesforce helps you:
- Identify key stakeholders in the buying process.
- Assess relationship strength and influence levels.
- Surface assumptions that can be challenged and validated.
- Prioritize engagement to improve deal and account plan success.
- Guide account strategy for better customer management.
Let's look at each in more detail.
Contact Mapping in Salesforce Helps You Identify Key Stakeholders
Gartner tells us that 6-10 people are typically involved in the B2B buying process. Yet, significantly fewer stakeholders are usually associated with key account plans and contact roles on opportunities.
Fortunately, the visual nature of a contact heat map makes it an excellent sales account-mapping tool for reviewing all individuals linked to an account. Now, you can spot essential stakeholders who may be missing.
To add missing stakeholders, look at the Contacts section on the right-hand side, then drag and drop individuals onto the heat map.
This feature also allows you to link contacts from other accounts when building a contact heat map in Salesforce using GSP Account Planner.
Stakeholder Mapping in Salesforce Helps You Assess Relationship Strength
Identifying all stakeholders is only one part of the process. You still need to assess and quantify the strength of your relationships with every contact.
Too often, we take a broad-brush approach to assessing relationship strength – for example, "We have inadequate relationships with the C-suite." Contact heat maps in Salesforce enable a precise, action-oriented way to quantify relationship strength with each stakeholder.
Now able to visualize sales relationships in Salesforce, you can build a segmented, targeted approach to managing stakeholder relationships.
Relationship Mapping in Salesforce Helps Surface Assumptions About Stakeholders
We all know relying solely on your own perceptions and understanding of any situation is dangerous. Yet we often fail to validate our assumptions with peers, colleagues, and managers when identifying and tracking stakeholder relationships in account planning and sales processes.
Contact heat maps in Salesforce help solve this problem by providing an easy-to-understand picture of stakeholder influence and relationship strength. Now, you can quickly and easily communicate your thinking to others to surface, validate, or challenge any assumptions.
Sales Account Mapping Tools Help You Prioritize Engagement
Now you're ready to prioritize action and engagement – the colors on the heat map help you do this. There are five colors:
- Red (Severe Risk): the contact has significant decision-making authority but a negative perception of your business or solutions.
- Orange (At Risk): the person plays a significant role and has a negative attitude towards you.
- Yellow (Needs Work): the person has a negative perception of your organization but plays only a minor role, or they have a mildly positive perception and a more significant influence in the buying process.
- Light Green (Stable): the person is positively disposed to you and may influence decisions.
- Green (Excellent): this person is a strong supporter and may significantly influence decision-making.
The contact heat map itself shows the number of people in each category, summarized at the top.
And you can also easily see the people already on the heat map, along with their status color.
The colors on the heat map help you identify and prioritize where you need to take action to engage with stakeholders. For example, the most urgent relationships requiring action are highlighted in red, making them easy to see.
Contact Heat Maps in Salesforce Help Guide Your Account Strategy
Creating a contact heat map in Salesforce during your account planning process significantly improves the quality of the plan's objectives and increases the likelihood of achieving successful outcomes.
For example, you may have seen account plans with objectives like this:
"Build and strengthen relationships with the C-suite executive team by October 30."
But is that really a business objective? Can you define and prioritize specific actions and track their outcomes?
A better objective would be:
"By October 30, secure an email from Sarah Jones (VP of IT) to her team recommending the initiation of a proof of concept for our solution, demonstrating her shift from a mildly negative stance to a supportive position."
You can see the difference. The contact heat map in Salesforce enables us to identify Sarah as a key player in the decision-making process and quantify the shift we aim to achieve in her attitude towards us. In other words, the contact mapping in Salesforce is a critical enabler of effective stakeholder relationship management because it allows us to define and track specific, executable objectives and actions.
How to Visualize Sales Relationships Using Contact Heat Maps
Your salespeople and account managers can build contact heat maps in PowerPoint, Excel, or another tool, and attach them to Accounts using the Add Files function.
However, it's a cumbersome approach that:
- Doesn't use all the contact data you already have in Salesforce
- Means you can't report on the results
- Makes viewing and sharing information difficult
The alternative is to use a sales account mapping tool, like the GSP Account Planner app, which makes building contact heat maps in Salesforce effortless.
Here's how it works.
Click the Manage Account Plan button to get started.
You can see there are 2 critical dimensions. On the vertical axis, we have Likelihood To Recommend.
By default, there are 6 different categories:
- Will Recommend You
- Supporter of Yours
- Interested in You
- Sees You Same As Everyone Else
- Mildly Negative
- Will Recommend Competition.
However, you can customize the values in the app to align with your process.
The horizontal axis measures the Level of Influence.
Again, by default, the app offers 6 categories, which can be customized if desired:
- Hardly Influences Decisions
- Influences Decisions
- Strong Influencer
- Minor Decision Maker
- A Decision Maker
- Only Decision Maker
Finally, drag-and-drop your contacts from the right pane onto the heat map.
Start Building Your Contact Heat Maps in Salesforce
To get started with contact mapping in Salesforce, visit GSP Account Planner on the AppExchange. Here, you can take a test drive, initiate a free trial, read reviews, and watch an overview video.
Alternatively, if you have questions or want to walk through the app in a web meeting, get in touch – we'll happily set up a call so that we can talk about contact heat maps in the context of your business.
Contact Heat Maps: FAQs
All contact heat maps will have stakeholders in the positive, neutral, and negative categories (if they don't, you're probably kidding yourself). However, a healthy contact heat map has significantly more people in the positive section compared to the other two. A healthy contact heat map also means you have specific business objectives aimed at improving the relationship with negative stakeholders.