Best practice: marking account as competitor in Professional level Mkt/Sales/Svc

[AmeliaE]

Haven't found this question asked - 

What is the best practice used by others to mark accounts as competitors? I routinely get competitor contacts register for various content items and offers and basically - nah, I want those to go to prospective clients, thanks! 

Therefore I want to mark competitor accounts consistently as such, so that the contacts linked to those accounts can be programmatically eliminated from offer issuance (etc). I cannot see a field intended for this purpose. I preferentially use system fields rather than making new ones, wherever possible. 

I run Marketing Hub Professional, Sales Hub Professional, Service Hub Professional, CMS Hub Enterprise. 

[karstenkoehler]

Thanks for sharing, @AmeliaE!

[AmeliaE]

Thanks Karsten, again much appreciated! 

I have gone ahead with the Company-based list, and believe it is working fine - this is good, as it enables us to enter competitor companies with their domain, and then anyone from those companies that converts on our content is automatically blocklisted. 

The solution I used (in addition to the Contact>Persona>Competitor), just as an FYI is:
- Created a Company-based list
- Added 'Competitor' to the standard Company>Type field options

- Created a Workflow that finds any Contact associated with a Company Type:Competitor is opted out, suppressed, and applies Contact:Persona:Competitor

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @AmeliaE,

The list based on competitor domains would be a contact list, not a company list. You can filter contacts by competitor email domains. (Email domain under Contact properties)

Best regards!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @AmeliaE,

With a written list of competitors, you can build an active list and filter contacts by competitor email domains:

Email domain is equal to any of competitor1.com, competitor2.com, competitor3.com

You could then either use this list as a default suppression / exclusion list for all of your marketing and sales efforts (communication, automation, rotation etc.).

By enrolling the contacts from this list into a workflow and updating certain values, you can make sure that these competitors are new skewing your reporting. I'd suggest updating the Lifecycle stage to "Other", the Persona to "Competitor" and potentially also introducing a new Lead status value for competitors.

Hope this helps!

[Olivier_novable]

I like the idea of the list based on domains, but for me it didn't work. I checked in more details and most competitors do not sign-up or subscribe with their obvious/pro email, they use other emails typically so I don't detect them. Using a persona is a nice way to get around this. 

[AmeliaE]

Hi Karsten,

Thanks for your post. I executed the Contact level exclusion by Personas; at a Contact level individuals can be marked Competitor Persona. From that I have a workflow to unsubscribe from all marketing comms as well as using it as a suppression on workflows ... just to b double safe! 

I would appreciate some clarity around your domain recommendation - I have made a Company list 'Competitor companies.' These companies have some contacts associated with them and have domain listed. How do you use this list of companies to suppress the associated contacts? I must be missing something - I made the list of competitor companies, but cannot use it to enrol in a workflow. Could you tell me the actual mechanism you use for this? Many thanks for your support. 

AMelia