Sage CRM

Looking for suggestions on this one. I have a prospect that is looking to use Sage CRM. They have many customers that have many ship-tos (20-30 or more). The various ship-tos are assigned to different salespeople (by territory/location). What is the best method to set this up in Sage CRM? We considered setting up the ""national account"" feature in 4.50, and each ship-to setup as a customer so that they are setup in CRM as companies (so the reps can record communications, etc.), but the customer doesn't want to do that for several reasons -- customers are used to their customer ID, it would make RMAs harder (their business is RMA heavy), and also a large majority of reporting has been done using ship tos and this time and they are not looking to re-do all that. Plus, all the history is under the ship to and they don't want to ""start over"" or go through a ton of work to move it. Our best thought at this point is to setup fields at the ""person"" level and keep the ""company"" open so all reps can see it. The fields would be to import sales figures and the ""person"" would be at the ship to level. The main obstacle there is that one person could be the point person for several ship-tos. But that's what they are doing with ACT (UDFs). So (not to be too long-winded) has anyone ever had a situation like this and how have you set up CRM in this scenario.

I think you need to guide them to an option that works. They seem to want to eat their cake and have it too.

This is a good question that seems like it will be bound to come up with regularity.

They have decided to use the ""person"" entity for each ship to.

Hmmm... I'm not sure if it would help but we have a product called Person MultiLink that allows one person to be associated to multiple companies in CRM?

@Dawn - so you will add a new ""person"" for each unique ""ship-to"" and the address for that ""person"" would be the same as a ship-to address? will you also have company addresses with links to ship-to addresses in MAS? or just skip that? the good part is you could assign an account manager for each ""person"" to provide an easy way to find persons/addresses by account manager. the bad part is it alters the process for order entry with the confirm-to and ship-to fields. will they be entering orders from within CRM?

Yes there will be a person per ship to address. Yes there may be a different account manager per person. At this point they are looking to use CRM just to track account notes, etc. but not enter orders. They are setting up fields to mimic what they had in ACT that shows the sales month 1-12 for the current year and one prior year. This way the reps can stay inside CRM and not venture into MAS.