CRM data structure when you have private and business customers

[FLIPPP]

Hello,

We are a software vendor and have both private (contact records in our CRM) and business customers (company records in our CRM with associated contacts). For all customers we save the same set of information such as customer type, size, etc.

We created the same properties for Contact and Company objects. The issues now are:

• Segmentation for emails, workflows, etc. is difficult because sometimes the information is saved in the contact record and sometimes in the company record.
• For companies with contacts we have sometimes saved the information in the company record and/or the contact record and/or the information is different across the fields.

I am worndering how other Hubspot users work around when having private and business customers and what you recommend as best practice? One solution would be that we create also for each private customer a "fake" company record and only save the customer information in the company record and remove the fields from the contact records.

I am curious to learning about your solutions 😉

Thanks so much,

Philip

[FLIPPP]

Hi Karsten,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I am not yet convinced about the solution. Say a company has 10 contacts and all properties would have to be kept up to date on the contact-level, this would mean that you need to check the values of each contact of the company which can be quite some work.

Additionally, say we have a property Customer with the values Yes / No and it is a contact-level property. What happens if for some contacts of the company is used yes or No and how would I be able to make sure that the same value is used across all contacts of a company?

Thanks again,

Philip

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @FLIPPP,

I think the solution lies in always having the information on the contact record whether a contact is B2C (business to customer / private) or B2B (business to business) or both. That should solve the issue of segmentation in workflows. This is also important because you don't want to rely on aggregated (company) information when it comes to the correct content for email recipient, whether a contact is private or business should be 100% correct.

If companies are always B2B, then this wouldn't have to be maintained on the company record. If companies can also be B2C, I'd recommend also maintaining this property on the contact record.

For B2C contacts, I would not necessarily try to maintain company records, unless your processes absolutely require them. If you could share more context here, that would be useful.

Hope this helps!