Using HubSpot CRM for both Merchants and Customers?

[rberger]

My company has two types of people we interact with and want to keep track of: Merchants and Customers.

Merchants in this case are businesses who agree to use and sell our product. We can easily use HubSpot in what I would consider to be "the traditional way" by setting up a Company for each Merchant and then affiliating Contacts with each Merchant to track activities and communicate with the Merchants.

However, each of these Merchants also has Customers who buy our product, and we want to offer support to those Customers and track interactions with them as well in HubSpot. My instinct in this case is create a Contact for each Customer, along with a custom "Contact Type" on the record to denote Merchant vs. Customer.

I'm pretty new to HubSpot, so I wanted to check in to see if anyone here has used HubSpot for managing two different types of records like this and if that strategy made sense in this context. This post seemed to suggest to me that I was on the right track, but figured I would ask in case anyone else had other ideas.

Thanks for any assistance!

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @rberger,

The post you linked is definitely the best way of dealing with this.  Set up a custom property with dropdown select.  

You might want to ensure this property appears prominently on the sidebar, so you and all your colleagues can quickly see this property value for each customer (https://knowledge.hubspot.com/settings/customize-record-sidebars).

I use this for distinguishing different customer types.  I also have a lot of non-customer contacts in HubSpot for whom I use Lifecycle Stage = Other (i.e. rather than Customer, etc.), which is also a really good filter, but Lifecycle Stage can't be customised.

[rberger]

Awesome thanks for the reply @AdamLPW . That's exactly what I was thinking also re: custom sidebar