Customers & organizations

In B2B you sell to an organization, not to a person. The organization has several sites, several people who are each allowed to do different things, an internal approval process, and payment terms you agreed years ago. The contract price, the credit limit and the delivery block belong to the company; the right to place an order belongs to a person. Once that split is right, pricing shows each buyer their own price, approvals follow the customer's own purchasing rules, and one order history covers everyone at the company.

Start with The B2B customer model if you are new to this. If you are setting up a store, go straight to Organizations and hierarchies, and read Self-registration before you open the shop to the public. In B2B an account carries your prices.

Understand

• The B2B customer model — Organizations, contacts, roles, and why a contact is never the customer.
• How procurement governance works — Cost centres, budgets and approvals, and what they are protecting.
• Credit control in B2B — Payment terms, credit limits and delivery blocks.

Set up

• Organizations and hierarchies — Create the companies, and model a customer with several sites.
• Contacts and roles — Who may see prices, place orders, and approve them.
• Addresses — Billing and delivery addresses, owned by a company or by a person.
• Segments — Group organizations so pricing and campaigns can target them.
• Self-registration — Let companies ask for an account, and decide who gets one.

Work with it

• Approve a registration — Work the pending queue and set up the new account.
• Payment terms and credit limits — What a customer may owe you, and for how long.
• Block a customer — Three different blocks, three different consequences.
• Approval rules — Route a purchase to the right approver.
• Cost centres and budgets — Carry the customer's accounting bucket to the order line.
• Log customer activity — Keep calls, visits and decisions on the record.

Keep it healthy

• Customer data hygiene — Duplicates, stale contacts and blocks nobody lifted.
• When a customer cannot order — Work through the layers in order.