B2B leads associated to the company we send them to via deals

[rjonesSolaria]

We are a b2b manufacturer and receive many leads from end users that we cannot fulfill directly. We pass them on to chosen customer companies that then install the product in a leads home. We need a way to associate it to the company we give it to and I thought we could use deals for this but it seems like there isn't a way to do this because deals are only set up to be associated to the contact of a company, not other contact types. 

This is the process I hope to implement:
A lead is qualified by its owner > an automation creates a deal and associates it to the appropriate company based on location and the lead> Notification is sent to the company> An intro email to both the lead and the company is also sent from the lead owner.

We then can create reports of each company's deals and send it to them for updates.

Would this require some custom object maybe to store the association instead of a deal? We only have Professional level of Marketing & Sales Hub. Anyone have any ideas on a workaround for this?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @rjonesSolaria,

You could use existing or custom properties to "label" your contacts. That way you can exclude them from automated communication. This is what I think @NicoleSengers is referring to, too.

For example, if you have contacts A, B and C from the main company associated with the deal and contact D who is affiliated with the company. You could now use a contact property, e.g. Buying role, to "label" these contacts correctly. This would allow you to exclude some of them in workflows and communications (by building exclusion lists, for example).

This would indeed be another step of data entry, correct, but it's not possible to automate this at this stage.

All of this can of course also be achieved with a custom object but it might work just as well custom properties to better categorize contacts that are associated with deals and companies.

Hope this helps!

[NicoleSengers]

HI @rjonesSolaria 

you can associate as many or few contacts to a deal as you like and they do not all need to be associated with the same company so you can absolutely associate a deal to the  contact who will be the final owner and a deal to the company you have assigned the deal to.

You could likely create a property called client/Installer that you could use to route communications to the correct people.

A custom object would do the same thing and would be easier to track and report on but you would need to upgrade to Enterprise for this functionality.

[rjonesSolaria]

Hi @NicoleSengers , thanks for your reply! Sorry for my delay in getting back to you.

Can you clarify what you mean here:

"You could likely create a property called client/Installer that you could use to route communications to the correct people."

What would I put in this property? A link to the contact's record? Is there a way to add an internal contact record link to a deal property like "client" with automation? Or the property would contain their contact information? I'd like to automate the deal creation as much as possible. 

I know I can add multiple contacts to a deal but that ends up creating issues when automating notifications, notifications I'd like to go to the company contact and not the client, and vice versa. With automation it sends every email to every associated contact. And I can't automate additional contact or company associations. 

No, the more I try to figure this out the more it looks like this just isn't going to work how I want it to. There will be more manual steps than anyone wants... maybe there is an app that makes some of this possible. I already upvoted the idea to add contact roles to deals, which would solve some of this problem, I think, but it's been in planning for a year.

[TitiCuisset]

Hi @rjonesSolaria 

Thank you for reaching out

I want to tag some of our experts on this - @NicoleSengers @Bryantworks @Jonno_Price do you have any thoughts for @rjonesSolaria on this? 

Thank you

Best

Tiphaine