I am brand new to BCM. I would like to use it to manage my vacation rental
properties. I am alittle lost on how to set this up. I have 4 rentals for
which I get inquiries, some of whom turn into renters. I am confused as to
whether my inquiries (prospects?) should be entered as Business Contacts or
Accounts.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Carole

Carole,

The design intent of BCM is that a Business Contact Record is for the
"PEOPLE" that you relate to in your business interaction and that an Account
Record is for the "ORGANIZATION" of the peope that you relate to. (Business
names, etc.) Your rental inquiries are from individual people because I
don't believe that you actually rent space to an organization comprised of
many people. Therefore it would make sense to employ the BCM Business
Contact Record items to track info about your prospective rental inquiries.

Another way to think of it is like this. Determine if your business activity
involves transactional sales that are directly between your business and
people in nature (B-to-P Direct Sales) vs. Business-to-Business. If you
selling your products and/or services to other business, then the BCM Account
Record item is utilized and accordingly linked to the new business sales
opportunity record.

Try to free yourself from what a BCM record item is called and think more
about the function that is involved in its use. Hope that helps.

-THP

Carole,

It sounds like you are on the right track in your thinking for using BCM with
your properties. The Opportunity Record is a good place to handle your lead
inquiries. As you play around a bit with your customization options I think
you will continue to answer your own questions quite well. There obviously
is no 1 "best way" to use BCM depending upon your needs.

-THP

Carole Kezios wrote:

Carole:

You could setup a Marketing Campaign for each of the advertising channels or
websites even if it's just in name only, although you could keep updating it
with the costs of the advertising. Then, when you get a new contact, choose
that Marketing Campaign name from the Initiated By field. That will link
that contact to where they came from. BCM stops short in having great
reports to calculate your cost per lead but you can get there by exporting
the report into an Excel spreadsheet and then doing some slicing and dicing
in Excel...

HTH,
Lon

"Carole Kezios" wrote:

Thank you - that is helpful. Guests and prospective guests would be Business
Contacts since they are all individuals.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can setup my properties? I have created
a custom field and labeled them 1, 2, 3, 4, which is helpful since I can
import all of my exisiting inquiries and rentals from my current management
program, and they are already classified this way. But I am wondering if
there is something better since ultimately I want to link them to a specific
property in the Accounting program.

Also - any suggestions on how to handle inquiries - am I thinking on the
right track if I label them as Opportunities?

Finally, I would like to be able to track my advertising dollars, so I am
looking for a way to create a report showing how many inquiries came from a
particular website, and how many turned into bookings. Would I use the
Source field? If I do, will I be able to link it to Source in an accounting
field? Otherwise, perhaps I could use the Accounts records for all of my
advertising sites, and then I could use the Initiated field to select the
advertiser.

Any comments or ideas?

Thanks