If you serve consumers (are Business-to-Consumer, or B2C) as opposed to serving other businesses (are Business-to-Business, or B2B), should you care if your software has you enter your clients as if they were a business?
Many software packages do assume that your clients are other businesses, and it can result in some awkwardness.
How exactly will you use the system as you enter your clients?
Approach 1: Create a Company record, and then Employee records
First, create a company record.
and then create employee records for each
Employee 1:
Employee 2:
Next create a sales lead under the company record.
Note that the company record may have fields for number of employees, industry, annual revenue, company website, which in your situation clutter the interface to some extent.
Considerations:
When integrated with other programs (like QuickBooks or a mass email program) exports will probably use the company name, and in those programs the records will be under the combined name “Dr. Jane Hendriks and Mr. Thomas Manankil”.
Also, for integrations, you’ll need to think about how records might be imported.
Next, note that in the company record the Salutation is mixed in with the names, because there isn’t a separate field for them. And in the employee records, you may wind up using the Job Title field for a salutation if there isn’t a specific field for it.
Approach 2: Create Only the Employee Records
In this case, you will skip creating a company record.
Employee 1:
Employee 2:
Considerations:
When the two people in a couple have different last names, you will want to consider how will you know that they are a couple when you look in the system.
You will want to make sure that your software will let you attach a Sales Lead to an ‘Employee’ record, not all software packages do. And if it does, which of the two people will you attach the sales lead to?
Conclusion
Entering consumers as companies isn’t an insurmountable problem, but nevertheless there is an awkwardness to using the company record.