In Salesforce, business data rarely exists in isolation. Accounts and Contacts are closely linked, and keeping them synchronized is crucial for maintaining trust, accuracy, and operational flow across your CRM. But what happens when a key field—like Industry on the Account—changes, and your related records don’t reflect that update?
That’s exactly the scenario we’re solving in this blog using a powerful Apex trigger and asynchronous Apex to update related Contact records only when the Account’s Industry changes to “Biotechnology.”
This kind of automation ensures that any business logic tied to specific industries gets cascaded across the system in a controlled, scalable way—without overloading governor limits.
🧠 Why Industry-Based Syncing Matters
In industries like Biotechnology, Finance, or Healthcare, Account data often determines how downstream systems, teams, or integrations behave. A single update to the Industry field might require changes across associated Contacts, Opportunities, or custom objects.
Relying on users to manually update related records opens the door to inconsistency and missed updates. By automating this with Apex—specifically using asynchronous logic—you can confidently push changes across large datasets without hitting platform limits or degrading performance.
This is a perfect example of using Apex triggers and async patterns to scale logic efficiently, while keeping everything in sync across related records.
🔍 What You’ll Learn in This Blog
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How to use Apex Triggers to detect changes on specific fields like
Industry -
How to implement context-aware logic (before vs. after update)
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Why asynchronous Apex is ideal for large-volume data updates
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How to keep your trigger bulk-safe, efficient, and governor-limit friendly
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How to design trigger frameworks that are modular and extensible
In this solution, the trigger is designed to handle multiple contexts—before insert, before update, after insert, and especially after update—where the main async logic is triggered.
By checking if the Industry has changed to "Biotechnology", the trigger then fires an async process that updates the related Contacts accordingly. This not only ensures clean data alignment but also keeps your system performant and future-ready.
🎯 When This Logic Comes in Handy
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Your business uses industry-specific logic across Accounts and Contacts
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You need to push updates across related child records upon changes in the parent
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Your org deals with large volumes of data where DMLs must be carefully controlled
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You want to implement governor-safe logic that won’t break in large batch operations
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You’re using Apex to enforce cross-object data consistency dynamically
This asynchronous update pattern is especially useful for scaling beyond just Contacts. The same logic can be adapted to update Opportunities, Cases, or even custom child objects.
👨💻 Developer & Admin Tips
Use a static Boolean isRunOnce flag to ensure post-update logic doesn’t run multiple times in recursive trigger scenarios. Make sure your asynchronous job handles bulk processing, either through Queueable Apex or Future methods, and always perform selective field checks to avoid unnecessary updates.
It’s also good practice to log or audit changes when critical fields like Industry trigger related record updates—especially if multiple teams rely on that data downstream.
To make this automation dynamic, consider storing triggerable industries like “Biotechnology” in Custom Metadata. This allows you to expand or modify the logic without deploying new code.
🎥 Watch It in Action – YouTube Playlist Included
If you prefer visual learning, we’ve got you covered. Our YouTube playlist walks you through this exact scenario: from setting up the trigger, writing the async logic, and testing the results in a sandbox environment.
Solution:
trigger AccountTrigger on Account (before insert, before update, after update, after insert, after undelete)
{
if(Trigger.isAfter && Trigger.isInsert) {
Account TriggerHandler.handleAfterInsertActivities (Trigger.NEW);
}
if(Trigger.isBefore && Trigger.is Insert) {
Account TriggerHandler.handleBeforeInsertActivities (Trigger. NEW);
}
if(Trigger.is Before && Trigger.isUpdate) {
AccountTriggerHandler.handleBeforeUpdateActivities (Trigger. NEW, Trigger.oldMap);
}
if(Trigger.isAfter && Trigger.isUpdate) {
if(!Account TriggerHandler.isRunOnce) {
Account TriggerHandler.isRunOnce = true;
Account TriggerHandler.handleAfterUpdateActivities (Trigger.NEW, Trigger.oldMap);
}
}