Why is salesforce so illogical??

[DaveDave]

Maybe it's just me, but the pricing model makes no sense to me. I am just a small business with less than 10 employees. My sales are to customers, not other businesses. For some reason I am *forced* to enter company info, account data, etc.  That's all great if I was IBM selling to Microsoft - sure I can understand that. The puzzling piece is you can get "Person Contacts" enabled - but you need to get the "Enterprise" or "Unlimited" model?!?! How does THAT make any sense.... One would think that the lower end stuff "Group" or "Pro" versions ONLY did Persons and if you wanted the more powerful B2B features of accounts and all that you would have to get the Enterprise version.... makes no sense to me at all... I get maybe 50 leads per month, just customers inquiring on my website and I need a tool to track them... thought this would be PERFECT, but at $125 per month times 5 people = $625 per month - forget it... am I missing something here???

[MATTYBME]

What edition do you currently have? Professional?

So If you have existing customers I would enter the company as the Account and create the Contacts (specific people) as Contacts against that Account. If these are prospects I would enter them as Leads.

You are able to adjust the required field settings in Setup>App Setup>Customize>Accounts>Page Layouts.

Without knowing the specific edition you have it is hard to know what Objects(Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, etc) you have access to.

If you have specific questions please do not hesitate to ask. 

[Knut]

I'm with you. At the lower end of the CRM editions, it seems more people would be keeping track of individuals as much as they are employees of companies. I'm a freelance ad/marketing writer, and I do a lot of business in partnership with other freelancers who are sole proprietors and do not do business under a company name. To work around this, I just enter their name as the account as well as the contact name. Technically, they are accounts, even if they are just one person and not a company. And they are the contact for that acccount. I tried making the account field not a required field for contacts, but Salesforce won't let you do that. It would screw up things down the line, like reporting, etc. 

Salesforce has it's own vocabulary and follows computer programming logic, not human logic. On the other hand, CRMs like Highrise, for example, have a more intuitive interface, but are not as robust as Salesforce. Personally, I'm trying to decide which way to go. There are pluses and minuses to each. 

Message Edited by Knut on 09-15-2009 07:35 AM

[MATTYBME]

What you need is Person Accounts. If when in Salesforce you select the "Help & Training" link and type in the search bar "What is a Person Account?"

This is what it says; 

"Person accounts are not enabled by default in Salesforce. To quicklyverify whether your organization uses person accounts, see if you have an option to select Person Account asthe record type when you create a new account. To request person accounts, check with your administrator or contact salesforce.com.

A person account isan individual consumer with whom you do business, such as a financialservices client, an online shopper, or a vacation traveler. Person accounts are applicable to organizations that operate on a business-to-consumermodel as opposed to a business-to-business model.

In a business-to-business model, there is a natural differentiationbetween the other businesses with whom you work and the people associatedwith those businesses. In Salesforce, that translatesto accounts and contacts having different fields, features, and tabs.In a business-to-consumer model, because you are providing productsor services to people rather than companies or organizations, thedistinction between accounts and contacts does not exist. Consequently, person accounts in Salesforce havea combination of fields from both accounts and contacts, and can beused as contacts in most situations that involve contacts. For example, business accounts do not have standard fields for email address and job title, but person accounts do. Also, person accounts can be associated with campaigns just like contacts, but business accounts cannot. For details on the contact-specific functionality thatapplies to person accounts, see Person Account Behaviors.

The ability for person accounts to act like contacts is made possible by applying an account recordtype which has special properties. The default name of this recordtype is "Person Account." Your administrator may have changed the name of this recordtype, and also may have created more account record types that havethe same special properties. For more information on record types,see Managing Record Types and Changing the Record Type Field."

[DarrellD]

I think he already saw Person Accounts as they were referenced in the initial message.  The problem is what license version you have to have to use them.  The rationale of making these available to the lower end does seem to make sense.

But I REALLY wish SalesForce would stop having Person Accounts count double towards storage.  This goes with the rationale initially logged and is a double whammy for small businesses.  Earlier this year, I had seen that storage was going to be updated to 3GB with Winter 10...but that seems to have gone away.  That still wouldn't address this though...but may help a little.