Mixing Person Accounts, Contacts and Business Accounts

I really enjoy the excitement of learning new things, especially through active discussion and target questions and answers. One of the subjects that never lets me down in this area is the concept of person accounts in Salesforce.

Having raved about it in previous posts, I feel obliged to answer a question that was posed about how to actually use person accounts and business accounts in the same org.

The answer could be fairly straightforward: In the standard sales processes, there's no need to mentally make a big distinction between the two. Opportunities are tied to accounts, not to contacts. This means that if a salesperson is trying to close a deal, it doesn't matter if the deal is for a person or for another organization. The opportunity is what's important, and it's always related back to the account entity, person or organization, with which you're doing business.

A trickier question which we're running into at work is: What's the best way to handle people who are both your direct customers and who are contacts at other organizations? Theoretically, the idea of linking the contact to both the business account and to the person account would work. In practice, however, I think if an organization is investing time and energy into this level of constituent mapping, then it would be worthwhile to analyze the business needs and maybe setup some workflow, Apex and Visualforce to take advantage of the data links.

Not to dodge the question entirely, but I think that there are always specific organizational needs that drive people to setup more complex and complete data models. If anyone's interested in discussing a specific use case, I'd be totally game!