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Getting Started with Greenrope: Contacts vs. Companies

By Shay Lucena

In order to setup your GreenRope account to best meet your unique business needs, first consider if your business is B2B focused, B2C focused, or a mix of both. Using either Contacts or Companies will be best determined on what your typical customer structure is.

There are a few shared functionalities between Contacts and Companies. Under either categorization, you can store related information, create custom user defined data fields, and manage CRM activities. While both of these entities are related and share similar functionalities, they each have their own benefits and limitations. We will review these key differences below.

Contacts

A Customer Relationship Management platform would be nothing without its customers! Even if your business mainly serves other businesses or companies as a whole, you will still use Contacts to manage those individuals who are your points of contact for that company. Contacts are the individuals with whom you interact with, whether that be your colleagues, partners, or clients. Each contact has their own contact profile, with individual demographics and notes.

Benefits and capabilities:

  • Segmentation and grouping: Contacts can be searched for based on their name, demographics, and other user-defined data fields. This can assist you with segmenting your contacts and accurately targeting them for sales and marketing purposes.

  • Search filters: Additional filters can be applied to contacts including delivery filters (identifies contacts who were sent, read, and/or clicked a previous email broadcast), attendance filters (identifies contacts based on their event attendance), random split filters, and subscription filters (bounced, spam complainers, and unsubscribers).

  • Marketing automation: The data stored within a contact’s profile can be applied to marketing automation tools such as Drip Campaigns, Journeys, and Workflows. For example, changing the value within a user field can trigger a series of automatically assigned actions through a Workflow. Additionally, demographic characteristics may be used to determine which series of emails a contact receives.

  • Company Association: A contact’s profile will contain their personal information within their “Contact Info” tab. This tab also shows Company Info, which is the information related to the company, itself. When viewing a contact’s CRM profile, you can review their personal and company information simultaneously. You may also assign a contact to be the primary or secondary contact for a company. This is a useful indicator for identifying the main points of contact for a company if you have several other linked individuals.

  • Shared Access: Shared access provides your colleagues or clients with the ability to login to your GreenRope account and access features such as Email, Contact Management, Projects, and more. This access is granted on an individual or contact level, and not on a company level. Users must be an existing contact within the account and have a valid email address to login.

  • Contact-Only Capabilities: Many GreenRope features function on a contact-level, meaning that they can only activate specifically for a contact and not for a company. Some of these features include sending email broadcasts, activating workflows, and tracking website visits. However, within a company profile, you have a centralized area to view all activities that have taken place with those company’s contacts. We will go over this in more detail below.  

Companies

While contacts are who you interact with, they usually belong to a specific company, especially if your business is B2B focused. A company is not a human like contacts are, but instead functions as an entity. Unlike contacts who can belong to only one company, a company can have many contacts. Companies are accessed under Contacts > View > Companies tab. This area will allow you to create, import, and manage your companies. Although features such as Workflows and Journeys cannot be activated for a company in the same fashion as contacts, company profiles are valuable for managing all contacts and associated activities in a single area.

Benefits and capabilities:

  • Company-Level CRM Activities: Company-level CRM Activities share the same functionality as Contact CRM Activities, except these are associated with the entire company and not with a particular individual. The user assigned to the activity would be able to view the activity within the company’s profile to see the activity, instead of needing to pull up a specific contact’s profile. These activities are useful for company-wide interactions and follow-ups. For example, submitting a proposal may be considered a company-level activity because it needs to be sent to the company and is not addressed to a specific person.

  • Shared Information: Company Information can contain the details about the company such as the business’ physical address or standardized email. This data can also be shared and assigned to all of the contacts associated with the company. So instead of manually updating the physical address and telephone number for each contact under that company, you can just input those details under the company’s profile and click to “Assign company data to contacts”. This will then automatically assign that data to each associated individual and save you the time from doing so manually.

  • Centralized storage: Instead of switching back and forth between contact profiles, you can see all CRM activities related to the company’s contacts within the company profile. Company profiles give you a bird’s eye view of everything happening with that company. This area serves as a consolidated storage of the company’s contacts, related CRM activities, opportunities, events, and other associations.

When beginning your GreenRope account setup, it’s beneficial to map out your goals and objectives so that you can best optimize the tools available to you. No matter how your business operates, you want to ensure that your CRM accurately reflects your company’s structure. By doing so, you will standardize and simplify your data in the long run. And when you have good data, the number of great things that can come of it are endless!

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