Contacts vs Company - When should I work on the contact and when on the company?

[Ewelina436]

I am in the process of changing the CRM system for a 50-person company. Before, I was using a different system and I have a few questions.

- I'm used to contacts only for contact customer. In the previous system, only a few details were added to the contact and connected to the company.

In hubspot, contacts have the same functionality and even a view as the company. What does work flow look like in this case?

Doesn't chaos arise and the employees don't make contact, sometimes the company? When should I work on the contact and when on the company?
- what to do when one contact is responsible for many companies. I can only link it to one company. Should I create the same contact twice? How will automatic email connection work?

Best regards

Ewelina

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ewelina436,

Since using HubSpot, I've been attempting to follow a more "inbound" approach to sales.  This has largely consisted of offering a bespoke experience to each prospect, and I guess leans strongly towards the Contacts side of things.  All of my deals, these days, are focussed around the individuals involved AT the company, rather than the company, per se.

I've not had any instances of chaos.  Let's say someone makes contact from a company - person A.  They get added to HubSpot, as does their company - company 1.  I then find out that several other parties are involved in the purchasing process.  Persons B through E.  So now I have 5 contacts in HubSpot, all with individual contact notes and activities, all within one company.

Let's say I add a deal, or one of my sales team adds a deal.  They can associate the deal with whomever at Compay 1 they like (person A only, person D only, persons A-E) AND the company.  They can allocate the deal to whomever they like at MY company.  Any tasks can similarly be allocated to either Contact or Company, or multiple.

I always work on the contact.  If the contact disappears, I might fall back on the company.  Maybe others work differently?

I haven't come across situations where one contact is involved in multiple companies.  When this happens, for you, does the contact have multiple email addresses (one for each company), or the same?  I can see this being problematic - might be worth a separate forum post looking for specific insight on this one, as no doubt it's come up for others in the past.