Salesforce Winter '07 includes a new feature called
Client Management, which allows B2C organizations to manage client contact records separately from the built-in B2B contact management database that assumes an Account relationship.
For years, we've had to workaround Salesforce by auto-populating the Lead and Contact Account name with names like "John-Smith-Household", or simply assigning all Contacts to a single Account. Client Management is a unique configuration of Salesforce that gives the appearance of being more client focused, but in actuality continues to maintain each client as both a Contact and Account in the legacy Salesforce schema and goes to some quite elegant lengths to manage this duality across the entire platform.
Client Management creates a new record type called "Person Account". The current notion of "Contact" doesn't go away, but it's recommended to rename the Contact tab to something like "Business Contacts" to differentiate them from client contacts.
My immediate concern, of course, was how does this impact web interactions? I'm still researching, testing, and confirming the following behaviors, so bare with me if you experience otherwise.
First off, Web-to-Lead will only create a Lead if the "Company Name" field is present. If there is no company name, then Web-to-Lead automatically converts the Lead to a Person Account. This actually makes sense since the Company Name today becomes a Lead's Account name on conversion.
The fact that the Web-to-Lead forms wizard in Salesforce will allow you to generate forms without a Company field creates a potential complication in the web forms publishing process.
What is not clear is if a Person Account can be converted to a Business Contact (or vice versa). For example, in effective 1:1 drip marketing it is always preferred to start the online dialogue by collecting only the bare minimum piece of information, such as email, then gradually profiling and collecting more information about the Lead over time.
What happens if you cultivate a potential Client for several weeks only to discover the client is actually a prospective channel partner? Granted, not an 80% use case, but it's one of those issues I do run into and we'll need the ability to convert a Client to a Business Contact.
So as a rule, the Web-to-Lead form generation process will require some double checking of the Company field and will perhaps need to prompt form designers to confirm their intentions.
My understanding is that the i-Dialogue Contact integration process would go unchanged, since there is no new API object type, just a new Account record type. This can be good and bad. Will web self-service need access to 2 records (Account and Contact) at all times to give clients a comprehensive view of their relationship?
Migrating an existing Salesforce instance to Person Accounts simply does not look like fun. I see now why the implementation guide recommends executing this migration in a Sandbox before making changes in production. Once Person Accounts have been activated, you cannot revert back (you cannot even downgrade to Personal Edition).
Recommendations:
I recommend that new Salesforce implementations must consider using Client Management if your clients are consumers and your relationship is not with their business. Some new B2B implementations may benefit from enabling Client Management from the beginning, but existing implementations should hold off on a migration unless you have a Sandbox to play in for a few weeks.