Best Practices Sales Cycle for B2C Business

Getting started migrating our inhouse "crm" to Sugar for a cosmetic skincare office

Currently using excel and outlook + paper files.

Im very confident Sugar can be modified to fit our needs but im having a bit of difficulty understanding how to create the correct workflow for B2C to ensure minimal issues later.

We primarily serve customers directly so the "Accounts" module is giving me some trouble.

1) Typically a prospective patient will either call us, email us or use the contact us form on the website = Lead

2) After the lead is entered our staff would contact them and ask them to complete a basic info form + photos  - Im currently calling this a Lead Conversion to Contact

3) From here we would create a CASE for a staff member to review the Contact information/photos and provide estimated costs and treatment plan

I think using the Case module would in step 3 by accessing the Contact module full of documents or person photos but the part that i dont understand is how the Accounts module fits into the picture. It seems we cannot have a Case without referencing some existing Account -- is that correct?

We are B2C so not sure how to treat a customer (person) as an Account.. maybe its just the term itself. not sure.

After the Case is completed it would become an Opportunity and if the patient comes in for treatment then the opportunity is won.

My question is really how can i make these modules flow seamlessly ( 360 view) while maintaining the same Lead and information accessible/related to each other in the different stages.

Thank you for any and all help!

  • Hi Charles Rosen,

    first of all this requires an on-premise instance as you need to do some changes within the SugarCRM files.

    The first step is to deactivate that accounts are required. This can be done in the config_override.php by adding:

    $sugar_config['require_accounts'] = false;

    Then run a quick reapir and rebuild in "Admin -> System -> Repair" to make this change active. From now on no account is required to create a contact. You can go ahead and remove the accounts module from the list of available module if required

    "Admin -> developer tools -> Display Modules and Subpanels"

    Keep in mind to adjust your layouts and list views by removing the account relation field.

    Now you need to add a new relation one-to-many from contacts to cases and replace the standard relation to accounts with it on the cases layout.

    Regarding the lead conversion you can configure which modules are available for conversion in Admin -> Studio -> Leads -> Layouts -> Convert view to something like this:

    So contact and case creation can be done within one step, also you can autofill custom fields in cases directly from leads. (this requires the fields to have the same system name!!!)

    I hope this first steps will help you to set up your B2C SugarCRM environment. Some of the things above will behave different in older or future versions of SugarCRM. Also I think other community members may have better or different solutions for your requirements.

    Regards

    Björn Canales Pfisterer

    Technical Support Manager

    provalida GmbH

  • hi Charles Rosen

    I'm interested to know if you feel the B2C setup worked well for you or any challenges?