Accounts vs. B2B Customers & Leads vs. Opportunities

Hey,

As a user who previously used other CRM apps I have some trouble understanding how OroCRM is structured. Here are my questions.

a) Accounts vs. B2B Customers

Usually a CRM has a “Company” list (in which you add all the companies) and a “Contacts” list (in which you add all the contacts and link them to the related Company, if necessary).

Reading the documentation I can compare Company with Accounts:

To collect and process information on the customer activity of a person, group of people or business cooperating with you, you can create an “Account” record (“account”) that will represent them in OroCRM.

But seems that OroCRM has another option: B2B Customers.

For each customer involved in the business-to-business activity you can create a “B2B Customer” record (“B2B customer”).

This option asks me to select a Contact and an Account. I have a feeling that “B2B Customers” resembles more with “Company” so, in this case, what does Account represents? I find it kinda useless to add the company as an Account AND as a B2B Customer.

As long as I don’t activate the “B2B customer” option in the Channels, the Sales button is not available, so basically I cannot generate Leads & Opportunities just by having Accounts and Contacts. Maybe I’m not understanding something?

b) Leads vs. Opportunities

Usually the workflow is simple: you have a lead that generates an opportunity which you pitch, negotiate and win/loose. But in OroCRM it seems that Leads and Opportunities are kinda equal, as defined in the Sales Process. In Oro you can start a new sale process from a Lead OR from a Opportunity. I didn’t found any way to link an Opportunity to a Lead, so I suppose that these two are interpreted as being at “the same level”.

So can you please define a Lead and a Opportunity, and mostly what’s the difference between them? An example will be great!

Thanks,
Razva

Topic

[Dima SorokaKeymaster]

This is a really good question and looks as our documentation not covering it in full and we will improve it. In the meantime let me provide some clarifications.

OroCRM is designed as a general purpose multi-channel CRM solution that allows to build 360 degree view of your customer. Out of the box we defined two customer types: B2B customer and Magento customer. Adding new customer type is the way to enable you customer presentation in different channels. An account could have one-to-many relation with multiple customers of different types. As example you can think about company “ACME” that presented with few customer accounts in your Magento store and interacts with your sales team on the phone. To represent this in OroCRM you will have “ACME” account, few Magento customers associated with it and one (or many, in case company reperesented by different departments) B2B customers.

So back to B2B customers, leads, opportunities and sales processes. All this records are part of our sales channel where B2B customer represents company or business as customer type, leads and opportunities are part of sales interaction with this customer type. Sales process is an example of workflow that could be established around lead and opportunity, but you can disable it and define your own, or enable lead and opportunity workflows that will provide more “classic” way of working with leads and opportunity.

Known issues:
– UX of working with multiple customer types
– UX of working with sales flow

We are going to resolve UX issues early next year, but i hope this gives you an idea of data structure in OroCRM.

[RazvaParticipant]

So basically in the “classic” way of thinking, B2B Customers should be departments OR a “copy” of the company? I’m thinking at the basic usage, that comes from a multiple channels but have the same client structure (Company -> Contact).

Is there any way to “activate” the Sales options without generating B2B Customers?

Regarding Leads & Opportunities, is there any way to generate a Sale Process that will work with the “classic” way of thinking (Lead -> Opportunity -> Pitch -> Negotiation -> Contract -> Won/Lost)?

Thank you so much for your replies and patience!

[Dima SorokaKeymaster]

This is part of the fix we are doing for user experience (streamlining experience around sales pipeline and B2B customer), it is coming next year.

For opportunities you could disable sales process workflow and enable lead and opportunity workflows. This will allow to switch to “classic” mode

[jrishi110Participant]

A firm or company without the correct leads is like a car devoid of an engine; no matter what amount of diesel you put into it, it will not move. However, generating b2b leads is not easy and trying to obtain leads in the B2B makes it all that much more difficult.The best B2B lead generation techniques begin with digging down into exactly the types of leads that are most likely to convert into paying customers. That means picking out prospects based on your resources and goals, and narrowing your attack.

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eNvent Software Technology- Digital Marketing company- http://www.enventsoft.com

[marcopanichiParticipant]

Hi, I have exactly the same doubts as Razva. I can follow and I agree with his approach but couldn’t follow Dima’s rationale.

I’m going through slide-by-slide explanations from https://oroinc.com/orocrm/media-library/orocrm-self-led-course#training=31669 and couldn’t understand the difference and what would be the use cases for Business Customer and Accounts – Is there any other link or material with use cases examples where I could better understand?

I agree with Dima’s approach to customise the configs and only use Accounts, but as far as I understood, there are info and activities that can be only recorded through Business Customers.

So, if anybody could improve the discussion here with examples/use cases where I’d use Accounts AND Business Customer, as well as Leads AND Opportunities, I’d appreciate.

Regards,
Marco

[Author]

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