Markets and Lines of Business Explained
Two words come up again and again when you set up how your organization sells: market and Line of Business. They sound alike, but they do different jobs.
A Market Is Yours
A market is a part of your business that you name and describe yourself. You choose the title and the short description, and that is what everyone on your team sees.
A few everyday examples:
- A party supply company might have Equipment Rental (tents, tables, bounce houses) and Party Store (balloons and decorations).
- A contractor might have Home Services (repairs and installs) and Maintenance Plans (a monthly check-up).
- A clinic might have Family Practice.
Each market gets its own page under Markets, its own vendors, and its own list of orders, bookings or jobs.
A Line of Business Is the Kind of Market
When you create a market, you pick one Line of Business for it. The Line of Business is the kind of work the market does, and it decides which tools the market comes with:
- Retail — sell products: catalog, inventory, orders, shipping and returns.
- Rental — rent out equipment or spaces: assets, bookings and returns.
- Service — do jobs for customers: requests, work orders, scheduling and technicians.
- Subscription — sell plans that renew: plans, sign-ups, seats and invoices.
- Procurement — buy from your vendors: purchase requests, approvals and vendor orders.
- Mortgage — originate home loans: applications, pipeline and closing.
- Personal Loans — lend to people: applications, offers and active loans.
- Healthcare — care for patients: patient records, visits and care plans.
So in the examples above, Equipment Rental is a market whose Line of Business is Rental, and Home Services is a market whose Line of Business is Service.
Several Markets Can Share a Line of Business
You can have more than one market of the same kind. A shop that sells both furniture and garden supplies might set up Furniture and Garden Center as two separate Retail markets, each with its own products and its own orders. The one exception is Mortgage: an organization can have only one Mortgage market.
Some Lines of Business need an app your organization has to have first. When one isn't available yet, the form says which app it needs.
Where You See Them
- Settings → Lines of Business is where administrators create, edit, reorder and archive markets.
- Markets in the main menu is where everyone works in them. With one market, the menu item carries that market's own name; with several, it opens a list of your markets by name, each with its description underneath.
- A customer's account page has an Orders tab that gathers what they bought, booked, rented or subscribed to across your Retail, Rental, Service, Subscription and Procurement markets. Mortgages, Personal Loans and Healthcare each get a tab of their own.
Not the Same as Lead Markets
The CRM has its own, separate idea of a lead market, set up in the CRM settings, which sorts incoming leads and their vendors and products (see Markets Explained). The two are connected in a few places — for example, a mortgage lead market can hand off to your Mortgage market — but setting up one does not set up the other.
