Contacts VS Companies

[#1]

Hola Amigos! My business teaches basic Spanish vocabulary to preschool aged children. I want to use the CRM to create a list of new preschools to contact and then track through my "sales" cycle of taking them from a prospect to scheduling a demo to finally teaching classes at the school. I rarely know who the actual contact person is that I need to communicate with. So, my prospects start out from the company side of things and not a contact person. I can't figure out how to create an email for the company without making a contact attached to the email. Does that make sense? All preschools have a generic email address (ie. info@preschool.com) that I use for my initial contact and then I get the email of the correct person to add as the contact for the preschool. So, how do I add in a generic email address for these preschools without making a contact? Is that possible? Should I switch and make the preschools the contacts? Any other suggestions on how to work this?  Thank you very much!

[#2]

Your best bet is to upload the schools as companies as long as you have a domain name for the school. From there you can prospect and add contacts as your fine working from company views instead of contact.

You can upload companies just like contacts without emails. 

Your CRM will look much cleaner and work better as you scale. 

[#3]

Sounds like you've answered your own questions @TxGarrett ...

In your use case, ...

-- Each school is a Company in HubSpot.

-- Your initial generic point of contact at each school is a Contact in HubSpot.

There's a setting in HubSpot to automatically create and associate companies with contacts. Turn that switch on and add contacts as you see fit.

Solved!

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Best,
Frank

Author, the Perfect HubSpot Series

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MFrankJohnson.com | Connect on LinkedIn

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[#4]

Thanks Frank, but I'm actually trying to do the opposite of what you wrote. I do not want to have to create a Contact just to put in the generic school's email address. I want to know if there's a way to add the school's email address under the Company's profile. If the Company info can have their website address, physical location address, and phone number, why isn't there a place to add in an email address too without it being linked to a contact?

[#5 · Accepted solution]

>>"If the Company info can have their website address, physical location address, and phone number, why isn't there a place to add in an email address too without it being linked to a contact?"

Great question @TxGarrett ...

Not to get all geeky, but the short answer is because of how scalable contact-centric CRMs (like HubSpot) work. In these types of CRMs, a single Company can be related to many contacts. This is known as a one-to-many relationship and is baked-in to the way the HubSpot CRM is built as the core of a marketing platform.

In other words, Company records were never intended to function as dual roles -- i.e., both a company AND a contact. Company records have a very specific job, as do Contact records.

That being said, email addresses are stored in Contact records (by design). We can only speculate, but in a contact-centric marketing platform identifiers like email addresses are intended for use only when contacting a specific individual -- our goal as marketers.

There is no inherent marketing benefit in contacting generic, role-based email addresses. In fact, many leading marketing platforms expressly restrict sending email to such addresses. Both HubSpot and Mailchimp do a nice job of explaining these restrictions and listing examples of same.

-- see Set up email filters in your conversations inbox (HubSpot)

- see Limits on Role-based Email Addresses (Mailchimp)

Again, tried not to get too geeky, but hopefully not too vague to be useful.

Bottom line?

Use Contact records to store contact info in Hubspot, then only send to those role-based email addresses (if necessary) from the sales tool. (important) 

Hope that helps.

Help answer your question? If so, remember to accept this solution now.

Best,
Frank

Author, the Perfect HubSpot Series

---

MFrankJohnson.com | Connect on LinkedIn

Help find posts quickly ... accept this solution now.

[#6]

Brilliant explanation! Thank you so much Frank!