Cloud meets CRM: how to keep track of who's who

In the early days of CRM, was simple: people were people and companies were companies. Adding a new person to CRM database was quite clear, if they came in by direct input or through integration through the clouds.

Two forces have mucked this. CRM systems has gotten more sophisticated, creating leads to integrate contacts. Just to spice up things, some systems, CRM created the notion of a person for B2C use cases. Then the boys Sell incited the pot by saying which leads were opportunities really early stage or even accounts ... Although these objects must be kept separate in any CRM system. And for fun, they added the template named account, which makes most cables in contacts, even though we would call those same people leads to a standard sales model.

So now the rules of how to incorporate new people in CRM records are about as simple as the rules for a game of Fizzbin (Google it).

Contact leaded vs

Going back to the basics, you might ask "why do we even need port anyway--why not just make everyone a contact?" In fact, there are situations where this is exactly the right (and of course, other) where is exactly wrong. As a generality, port is people who just know (aside from some level of interest), and the contacts are people we've talked about and know a lot. Typically, leads cannot be attached to the accounts, but must be contacts.

Port have some special properties in CRM systems, most notably: (1) the system assigns to representations by using rules and (2) that can be owned by a queue--not just by an individual. Both of these features are really valuable if you have a lead nurturing Group (often called telesales or telemarketing, inside sales).

If you are a pure B2B lead with no nourishment and a pure group named account model (for example, in/aerospace), well you might be able to lose the table leads. Each is essentially a contact because you're only interested in employees of your named accounts (which are precompiled in the system).

In most B2B companies, however, even if you don't have a group of nurturing it cannot blow away the lead. Marketing systems from other clouds (like Google Adwords, email blasters, drip marketing and social networking tools) almost always work on the subject of lead. These integrations with cloud CRM system may not allow you to use a contact object.

Also, if you are a B2C shop and the use of person-conti, really sorry you get rid of the cables.

Person vs. accounts

In B2C world, customers are individuals. Even if they are part of a company, they are not treated in this way. This problem is increasingly common with companies doing e-commerce and by accepting credit cards: each purchase is made by John Doe, the credit card holder, and there is no real account to pin him. In some systems, you handle this by giving the company called "individual" on all those contacts.

The person-account has been developed to facilitate this, using a hybrid object that has the characteristics of a contact and an account. When viewing a person, there is essentially a contact: there is only the account. So when you enter new contacts in CRM system, if you use the account of the person you are inserting actually accounts. If you're not careful, this is going to go over very well with people in accounting.

So for the B2C CRM systems, lLeads are really important as a way of storing information Handbook without creating bogus accounts.

So what is the paradigm?

The exact rules for which object to use when inserting new people into your CRM system "will depend on the specifics of your business process lead management. But the General model will be along these lines:

• Identify first, if the person works for one of your named accounts. (Note that doing a fuzzy match against all the different divisions of a company like The Walt Disney Company that can make it very research). If so, you can put the person as a contact associated with that account.

• Identify later, if the person works for one of your accounts. Depending on your business rules, or add the person as a contact is connected to your account or just a lead.

• Identify later, if the person is an individual. If you need to make an immediate transaction with them, place them as a person-account. Otherwise, enter them as a lead.

• What remains should be treated as a lead, but a hierarchy of routing and scoring rules to be applied. First, apply rules only to geographical level "what country." Then apply rules for Government and industry of the country (e.g., national Governments and departments of defence properly, go to the territory specified industries are directed to the appropriate management team partners). And finally, geographical local rules are used to assign the port to the territory of the relevant partner or sales. If there is insufficient information on a particular lead to use geographic rules, assign the new records to a generic queue.

To avoid damage to the database, any source of leads or contacts--a simple lead flow or an external cloud--must follow these rules before inserting new records of perspective. Fizzbin, indeed.

David Taber is the author of Prentice Hall's new book, "Salesforce.com secrets of success" and the CEO of SalesLogistix, a consulting company from Salesforce.com certified focused on improving business processes through the use of CRM systems. SalesLogistix customers in North America, Europe, Israel and India, and David has over 25 years experience in high tech, including 10 years at VP level or above.

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