Creating a company record for B2C sales?

[GenMan]

Is this a good practice? I'm using ChatGPT (lol), to help setup our Starter HubSpot instance and our use case is not so straighforward.

We work mainly B2C with some B2B sprinkled here and there. ChatGPT is recommending that if we are doing an installation for a consumer, to create a company "LAST NAME RESIDENCE" for proper tracking of custom properties and future reporting. This way things won't be mixed up between contacts and companies.

Is this recommended? Has anyone done anything similar or is there a better solution?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @GenMan,

That depends entirely on what your business model is and what your customer journey looks like. Generally, in B2C, you don't need a company record.

What your ChatGPT query / answer suggest though, is that there could be something associated to a contact – an installation or multiple ones? (An installation of what?)

If that's the case, storing that information on a separate object can help. Keep in mind however that under Settings → Objects, there are other objects which might be equally or better suited, such as Tickets, Projects, Services, Courses, Listings, Appointments, or Deals. These can also be renamed, thanks to a recent product beta.

Which one makes most sense, again, depends on your customer journey / business model / object logic.

Best regards!

[GenMan]

Is there a one to many type of association? For example, one job may have 1 piece of equipment and another may have 4, for example.

Thanks again for taking the time to review this with me.

[karstenkoehler]

@GenMan yes, there is 🙂

[GenMan]

Interesting! Is there a limit on the starter plan I should worry about before I get too excited about this? lol

For each listing it woud be great to have 

Brand

Model

Serial Number

Install Date

Warranty Expiration

Service Agreement

Remote Monitoring

That's 7 custom properties I can think of atm

[karstenkoehler]

@GenMan the starter plan gives you 1,000 per object so you should be good 😉

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @GenMan,

That depends entirely on what your business model is and what your customer journey looks like. Generally, in B2C, you don't need a company record.

What your ChatGPT query / answer suggest though, is that there could be something associated to a contact – an installation or multiple ones? (An installation of what?)

If that's the case, storing that information on a separate object can help. Keep in mind however that under Settings → Objects, there are other objects which might be equally or better suited, such as Tickets, Projects, Services, Courses, Listings, Appointments, or Deals. These can also be renamed, thanks to a recent product beta.

Which one makes most sense, again, depends on your customer journey / business model / object logic.

Best regards!

[GenMan]

I appreciate the thorough reply. We sell, install and service residential generators.

The project object will help us track the progress of each installation. But where I guess it can grow complicated is if we have a homeowner with more than one equipment on the property, or maybe a homeowner with more than one home with said equipment?

Then we would have companies with equipment at one location, many equipment on different areas of a large location, and others who are larger who will have multiple equipment spread through various locations.

I guess this is where I am getting caught in trying to define better. Each equipment will be tied an address. 

Long term, we want to know the information of that equipment for service agreement tracking, expired warranties, etc. so we can market properly to upsell service agreements, extended warranties and other items.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@GenMan in that case, I would really recommend using the 'Listing' object in the data model and renaming it into 'Installation'. https://app-eu1.hubspot.com/l/product-updates/?rollout=209030

Wherever you have actual companies, you would associate the company record with the listing(s).

---

@GenMan wrote:

Long term, we want to know the information of that equipment for service agreement tracking, expired warranties, etc. so we can market properly to upsell service agreements, extended warranties and other items.

---

There is also a Services object, which you could then use. I'd really recommend checking out the available objects in the data model, but generally here's what I'd do:

• Use contact records for B2C customers or contact persons in the rare B2B cases
• Use company records for B2B customers, associate those with the B2B contacts, too, of course
• Enable Listings object, rename it to Address, associate it with contact and/or company
• Enable services object, associate it with Address, Contact and/or Company to keep track of service contracts

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/associate-records