Create end user as Contact or Account?

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Hello everybody,

I'm new in the community and hope to get help for a small but mighty problem. I have the following issue: My new job is the rollout of Dynamics in our enterprise group. We are a company that sells its products exclusively through distributors to end customers. In other words, we sell to the dealer and have almost no touch points with the end user.

However, in the near future we will gather more and more enduser data (due to product registrations, etc.) as well. So now here is the question: Shell we create these end user data as Accounts or Contacts in CRM? I prefer to create “Contacts” and link them to the dealers` Accounts. BUT: Most of my colleagues argue that only the dealers` employees should be created as Contacts and linked to the dealers` Account. And therefore also end user data have to be maintained as Accounts. Now I don`t know what to do. What would you recommend?

Thanks & Have a nice Weekend!

Trish

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Aiden Kaskela 19,696 on at

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Hi Trish,

You should (almost) always represent companies as Accounts and individuals as Contacts. You can have different fields that mark if a contact is an end user or some other contact that you want to track.

Out of the box, a contact has a parent account and that's typically the company they work for. If you want to track end users associated with the distributor, you can add a new relationship (N:N) between contact and account to represent "End Users", or you could have a new entity like 'Product Registration' that has a lookup to contact (for the end user) and a lookup to account (for the distributor), and any other fields about what that person bought from that distributor.

Hope this helps! I'd appreciate if you'd mark this as Answering your question.

Thanks,

Aiden

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Ian Nicholls 4,157 on at

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Hi,

i assume an end user could buy through any distributor. I'd certainly make the end users contacts and then if you wish to capture details about their end user company create a custom entity for end user account. On registration I'd probably create a connection between the end user and the distributor called 'customer of'. This way you can report and extract data for marketing around the relationships between end users, distributors and end user companies.

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Community Member on at

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Hi Aiden,

that was very fast - stunning. I guess this won`t be my last question I addressed in the community.

I talked to my colleagues once more about how our customer structure / structure of distribution looks like (I`m new with my company). It looks like this:

We sell to dealers – dealers might have sub dealers – the dealers (or sub dealers) sell to end customers which can be companies or individuals

So now after having a clearer picture my solution might look like this:

• Dealers and their sub dealers (= both are accounts) are linked via the field “Parent Account” to each other

• End customers are created as Contacts (when they are individuals) or as Accounts when they are a company.

What I still don`t understand is how to link the end customers to the (sub) dealers.

• If end customer = Account I could use the connection functionality (“End User”)

• If end customer = Contact I need a Parent Account out of the box. Should I select therefor the dealers` Account? If so, I wouldn`t need the Connection functionality on top, correct? But what to do, if I need to capture details about the company the end user works for? Then in turn I would need to select the end customers` company as “Parent Account” --> conflict.

What do you think?

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Aiden Kaskela 19,696 on at

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Hi Trish,

Your requirements sound pretty standard. Contacts and accounts should be about individuals and their companies, independent of any purchase. If you have an end user who is a contact, their parent account should be the company they work for. The parent account for that company would be it's corporate parent if there is one. With the dealers, same setup.

If you want to track purchases between a contact/account and a dealer, you want to use new customizations instead of re-purposing the built in ones. Even if the built in parent account wasn't being used, it doesn't meet your need because I could buy something from two different accounts and you would only be able to track one account.

I'd still create a Product Registration entity. Before I said there would be the account (Dealer) and a contact (End User - Contact). Since an end user can be a contact or account, just add a second lookup to account (End User - Account). When the records are created or generated, you'd always set the Dealer lookup and one of the End User lookups.

Hope this helps! Let me know if I missed something or if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Aiden

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Jeevarajan Kumar 781 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi Trish,

I can suggest you to design this in one of these below methods.

End User = Contact, End User's Company = Account (OOB's parent account). Have Dealer and Sub-Dealer as an Account with different types (option set names as Dealer or Sub-Dealer). As Aiden suggested, have a custom entity (transactional entity) with below fields

Lookup to End User or use 'Customer' type attribute which applies for End User who is of both type Contact and Account.

Look up for Dealer or Sub-Dealer of End User

Company. It is easy for retrieval and report generation.

2. Same as Method 1, but rather having a custom entity you can an additional field for Dealer or Sub-Dealer.

3. Dealer or Sub-Dealer can be added as a connection to End User, but it is difficult to maintain when your system grows.

Hope this helps. Kindly mark it as verified if this one helped you.

Thanks,

Jeevarajan Kumar

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Community Member on at

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Hi Aiden,

I start liking the idea of a custom entity. I assume that in the long-run we will get end customer data manually, via csv. uploads and interfaces into the system. Does such a custom entity with look ups for Contacts and Accounts support these 3 sources? The only thing I`m struggling with is that I need to create all needed contacts / accounts first before I can add them via a lookup to the custom entity, right? Might be a bit time consuming? Or I could open the custom entity first and then start creating the needed End customer Contact / Account out of the lookup field. But is this also working with an Interface / csv. upload?

Did I got you right?

My heartfelt thanks to all of you!

Your help is much appreciated and makes me feel not alone with my CRM problems.

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Aiden Kaskela 19,696 on at

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Hi Trish,

You can use the same import tools for out of the box and custom entities. Here are details for the import tools: msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg328321.aspx

You can import a CSV to generate your customers, then import another CSV to generate the product registration.

Hope this helps!

Aiden

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