When exactly should I create a company for a contact?

[LVaccaro]

Hi community! I was searching a lot about this but I still don't have it clear. As the title say: Until what moment should I use contacts and when should I create a company?

I'll try to explain the lead journey we currently have/want to give context. It's a B2B business based on a SaaS platform similar to Shopify but for digital content.

The process I imagine is the following:

Marketing actions generate visits/leads from campaigns, forms, webinars, scrapping+sequences, etc. Once the contact interacts with any of these, Hubspot creates the contact or changes the lead status and once they are qualified, they are moved to a Sales pipeline (creating a Deal) to be qualified for a human after a mail/call. If the Deal moves forward and closed-won, we create the company associated with their Store created in our platform and associate the user/Deal with this company.

If the deal closed lost or bad timing, Should we create a Company as well?

Should we create a company before?

And I have another question a little bit related. Once you work with multinational companies which use the same domain but work separately in each country. Should you create different companies for each country o there's any other best practice to handle that just for contacts?

I hope I made myself explain.

Thanks!

[GrantCarlile · Accepted solution]

Hi @LVaccaro, this is Grant,

Would love to hear more about your process. Two things here I want to address - the structure of companies and the timing of documenting company records.

First thing, with parent and child companies, as you said who might have different website domains - you can document those within a given company record, I recommend you add them as separate companies then establish a parent-child relationship to them. When you add the contacts, add the associated companies as well. 

...which gets into the second piece - yes, to be clear, as you establish the contacts, I recommend you document the company. This relationship will help bring context to the conversation, to the contact record, and to later contacts as they're added where there might be overlap, connections, or some other variable you value you're able to now filter on because that data is already available. Here's where you'd make a list of contacts and filter by company properties:

Love to hear about what you end up moving forward with! Hope that helps.

Onward,

Grant

Grant Carlile

Grant Carlile, RevOps Developer

RevPartners is an unmatched team of operators who design and execute revenue engines to supercharge your growth. 

[BukunmiOdetayo · Accepted solution]

Hello @LVaccaro ,

Happy New Year from here! You already have a great pipeline and I love how you've mapped out your workflows. It's really fantastic. However, to answer your first question, your deal stage configuration shouldn't stop at Deal Closed Won/Lost. You should extend it to Won/Lost Reason. By doing this, you have another stage to prepare for. If a deal is won, which is good, then you proceed to state the won reason(s), which will surely help you in winning more deals. That is when you also create a company for the contact right? On the contrary, if a deal is lost, you should also identify the lost reason(s) and figure out how ways to avoid the frictions that occur during the sales process that made you lose the deal. That means you will also need to create a company for the contact AFTER THE DEAL IS LOST. Although the deal is lost, it is for that time. If the contact has not unsubscribed, you can reenroll them or move them into an automation (workflow/sequence), and who knows? They might have a need for your service in the future. If you created a customer journey map, you would better understand the motives behind that.

To your second question, since there is the same domain, I don't think you should create different companies for different countries. I will recommend focusing more on the contacts in each country - that is how you figure their needs and be able to offer solutions. The basic goal of your inbound strategy is to be human. What you can do is create a specific form for such cases where you have multinational companies, and have them fill out their countries/locations. You can then create lists where you segment them. By doing that, you are able to attend to all of them differently according to their needs with automation or one-on-one marketing activities. This is because although they are a company altogether, their needs might be different per time since they are not in the same location.

Please let me know if this helps.

[GrantCarlile · Accepted solution]

Hi @LVaccaro, this is Grant,

Would love to hear more about your process. Two things here I want to address - the structure of companies and the timing of documenting company records.

First thing, with parent and child companies, as you said who might have different website domains - you can document those within a given company record, I recommend you add them as separate companies then establish a parent-child relationship to them. When you add the contacts, add the associated companies as well. 

...which gets into the second piece - yes, to be clear, as you establish the contacts, I recommend you document the company. This relationship will help bring context to the conversation, to the contact record, and to later contacts as they're added where there might be overlap, connections, or some other variable you value you're able to now filter on because that data is already available. Here's where you'd make a list of contacts and filter by company properties:

Love to hear about what you end up moving forward with! Hope that helps.

Onward,

Grant

Grant Carlile

Grant Carlile, RevOps Developer

RevPartners is an unmatched team of operators who design and execute revenue engines to supercharge your growth.