1. Configuring Sales for B2C
  2. Configure Your Sales Applications for B2C

Configure Your Sales Applications for B2C

Regardless of the type of sales environment you're in (whether business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C)), almost no changes are required when implementing your sales applications.

If you're in a B2C sales environment, there are just a few additional configuration steps in the area of account and contact management that you should do. Make these minor changes so that your users can sell directly to individual people (consumers, also known as contacts) and not to businesses or corporations (accounts). Read this guide to learn how to enable a simple B2C deployment of your sales applications. Simple B2C means that you're selling only to contacts, not to households.

Overview of B2C Configuration Steps

If your users (or partners) are selling directly to individual people in a B2C environment, then you should make the same set of changes across the objects listed below.

  • Contact

  • Opportunity

  • Activity

Specifically, to track people instead of accounts, you should make these changes. These changes are described in more detail in the rest of this guide.

  1. For each object, change the name of the Account field to something that makes sense for your business.

    In a B2C environment, you're selling to people, not to accounts. You should still use the Account field, but you should change the field label to something that works for you. For example, do you refer to the people you sell to as clients? If so, then change the name of the Account field to Client.

    Tip: You might need to rename additional fields as well. For example, you might want to rename the Account Phone Number field to Client Phone Number.

  2. Set the default value for the Customer Type field.

    The Customer Type field indicates the type of customer you have: account, contact, or household. In a simple B2C configuration, you're not selling to accounts or households, so you should set the default value to Contact and hide the actual Customer Type field from users so they can't change the value.

    The default value that you set for the Customer Type field controls which search and select dialog box displays in the Account field (which you have renamed to Client or Customer or whatever works for your business). If you set the default value for the Customer Type field to Contact, then the Search and Select: Contact list of values displays at runtime when your users want to search for and select a customer or client.

  3. If you use the concept of both customers and prospects, then unhide the Type field on the Contact set of pages, and disable the Contact value in the field's underlying lookup type. Your contacts will be either customers or prospects.

  4. Hide any fields that aren't applicable to individual people, and unhide fields that are applicable to individuals but are hidden by default.

    For example, you might want to do the following:

    • Unhide the Marital Status field on the Contact set of pages. This field might be important for individuals.

    • Hide the Account field on the Contact set of pages. This field is for B2B contacts.

    • Hide the Primary Contact field on the Opportunity set of pages. This field is typically not applicable in simple B2C where you sell to a single contact.

  5. Change the springboard and Navigator to hide the Accounts icon, since you're not selling to accounts.

Changes Required for the Lead Object

Note that you should make slightly different changes for the Lead object. For the Lead object, the Account field is already separate from the Contact field, so there is no renaming of the Account field required. However, two Account fields and two Contact fields are delivered for your use. In a simple B2C environment, you don't need the two Account fields, so complete these steps for the Lead object:

  • Hide the Existing Account field, and confirm that the New Account field is hidden, on the Lead set of pages. In a simple B2C environment, you don't need to show the Account fields.

  • Confirm that the Existing Contact field is displayed. This field lets your users search for and select an existing contact to associate with a lead.

  • If you want your users to be able to manually type in new contacts, then unhide the New Contact field. This field is a manual text input field and is delivered automatically hidden in standard Lead page layouts.

Read this guide for more details about how to make these changes in the application.