Oracle Sales Cloud is all about understanding who your customers are and interacting with them in order to directly or indirectly generate revenue. Notice how vague this personal definition of mine is 😎 This is due to the fact that Sales Cloud is a very flexible solution that needs to support a wide variety of sales processes. A financial institution or insurance company does not deal with their customers in the same way as an industrial manufacturing organization or a consumer goods organization do. Actually, they do not even serve the same types of customers!
- B2C companies most often sell high volume of cheaper products and services to consumers
- B2B companies most often sell lower volumes of relatively more expensive products and services to businesses
- B2B2C companies like consumer goods companies sell to retailers who then sell to consumers
So far on my blog, I have discussed a number of account types that cover most of these customers mentioned above. Partners and Competitors are special types of accounts who have gotten their own introduction already too, but 2 account type still need their introduction.
Consumers
In a B2B setting, we sell to organizations, identified by an address and a name, linked to an industry, segmented by all kinds of attributes that we can get from data suppliers like Oracle Data-as-a-Service, D&B or others and managed in a professional Customer Data Management application. They are known through personal relationships with contacts working at these organizations. We do not sell to these contacts directly though, we sell to their employers.
In a B2C setting, the customer no longer is an organization but it is an individual, identified by an (email) address, a phone number or a Twitter handle. These are our consumers. Countries full of consumers, impossible to track were it not for the internet. Platforms like Oracle DMP allows us to understand what they do and how to interact best with them.
Households
There is another aspect of consumers that is valuable to sales organizations that target them. Consumers can have strong relationships amongst them. Relationships that directly influence them in the choices they make on a daily basis. My first bank account was with the bank where my parents had their accounts and I am sure our telco provider does not care much about me personally as I have a company mobile phone, but as member of my household, I am important to them as my family all needs phone contracts, and internet, TV and whatever other services they provide.
Households allow us to understand the real value of consumers through the relationships they have between them.
Households in Sales Cloud
In order to gain insight is these relationships, Sales Cloud allows you to group consumers in households. A household represents probably the tightest of relationships between consumers and therefor is very valuable in predicting their consumer habits.
A household in Sales Cloud is nothing more than just another type of account, an account of type ‘Group’ more precisely. If you create a new household or edit an existing household, the screens you use are almost identical to the screen you use to make or edit any other type of account.
Once a household has been created, members need to be assigned. This comes with a nice visual diagram that show how they are related and allows us to navigate between members easily.
A few things are different though. Opportunities can not only be created against the members of the household individually, but also against the household as a group. The summary boxes in the image below shows the information about the household and the members together. In the household below, 2 opportunities were created against the household members and 1 against the household directly but the summary box shows that the household represents 3 open opportunities.
Using the out-of-the-box analytics capabilities of Sales Cloud, detailed reports can be created to better understand households.
And what if we rename household to sports club, building, or any other kind of grouping or network of people. Households could be used to better understand any group of individuals.
