Customer, dealer, supplier, agency, competitor: All are roles assumed by a single identity
Marketing’s counterpart is not only the customer. Dealers and distributors, suppliers, agencies and media organizations, trade fair organizers, industry associations, public institutions, competitors, influencers, and the contact persons within all of these
organizations are the parties marketing is in touch with every day and about whom it accumulates information. Business partner management is defining each of these parties with a single, accurate identity, gathering their relationships,
roles, contact information, addresses, people, and history in a single record, and ensuring that sales, marketing, service, and finance use that record in the same way. Everything you know about a party
should reside in that party’s record.
In most companies, business partner information is fragmented by role. The same company sits in four separate places: as a customer record in accounting, a supplier record in purchasing, a row in a mailing list in marketing, and a business card in the trade fair file;
when its name changes, all four are updated separately, or not at all. Who within the company is the decision maker, who is the user, and who is the buyer lives in the sales representative’s memory. Because group companies, branches, and
parent-subsidiary relationships are not visible in the system, three companies of the same group are given three different terms, and the total relationship at group level is never seen. When the person leaves, the relationship leaves too.
In Minerva, business partners are defined not as customers and suppliers, but as persons and organizations; customer, supplier, dealer, bank, agency, competitor, and employee are roles added on top of this identity.
The master record is created once in the central system, all group companies make use of the same record, and company-specific information is kept separately at the company level. The organization’s branches, subsidiaries, contact persons, addresses,
communication channels, segments, and sales channel and region relationships are managed under a single record; company-specific information is added with user-defined fields and tagging. Because correspondence, documents, meetings, calls,
campaign contacts, quotations, and orders are linked to this record, marketing, sales, and service see the same business partner in the same completeness. A company that is both your customer and your supplier is managed with a single identity and two financial accounts;
the total relationship, risk, and profitability at group level are reported directly.
Know your business partners not on separate records department by department, but under a single identity with all their roles and their entire history.