Storing competitors alongside customers?

[expee]

Sugar CRM Community Edition Version 5.2.0k (Build 5837)

Hi everyone,

I work for a business to business marketing company. I'm new to Sugar and want to use it to store information on the company's own customers, but also rival companies and their customers. Does anyone have any experience of this? I could create the rival company as an Account, type: competitor, and their customers as 'leads', which I could then link to them.

These sort of customers use a lot of different marketing companies, so it would be useful to have them stored as an individual entity rather than simply recording them in 'description', so that they can be moved around.

I know this isn't what Sugar was designed for, but do you think this is a good way of adapting it? Thoughts?

[arnaud_carrenet]

Hello Expee,

from my point of view you have 1 good solution :
Use the "member of" field in Account where you could say this customer is a "member of" this competitor Account (viewed as N+1). Then when you go to Competitor record / Member Organization subtab, you can see all its customers. This also works for your company and your customers.
To go in further details you can create a type of account that could be "Competitor's customer" so that you will be able to find them easily.
Hope that helps.

[expee]

Ahh yes that makes a lot of sense, good idea! Before I get going, does everyone else agree, or anyone have any other ideas?

[expee]

I've tried it out, it works but you can only make a customer a 'member of' one marketing company- when in reality they may be using several simultaneously. Any ideas?

[arnaud_carrenet]

You're right.
When I started my first answer I was about to explain both solutions to you but I told myself : "start simply" ;-)

So the second solution is to create a new module (from Sugar admin / Developper tools / Module builder) : many to many relationship with Account.
You will then be able to link one account (customer) to several marketing companies.

I'm not a developper so I'm not able to give you a lot more details about module creation.
The only thing that I know is that is very difficult to remove relationships once you have created them in SugarCRM so please BACKUP your live system and make a TEST SERVER !
It works perfectly fine once correctly created.
Regards,

[expee]

Great, thankyou! I'm going with the first option as I have no idea how to do the latter, seems to be working really well so far.

Thanks for your help.