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Where you locate your business depends in part on the location of your target market, business partners, and your personal preferences. In addition, you should consider the costs, benefits, and restrictions of different government agencies.
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My business has many brick-and-mortar retailers that sell our products. Some of these companies have more than one location. Some of them have a different contact for each location, some have a single contact for all locations, and some are a mix of both.
Right now, the workaround is to create a company for each location (which doesn't work well in "single contact for multiple locations" scenarios). Ideally, there would be a mechanism to attach some sort of "location object" to companies and, then, be able to attach one or more contacts to those location objects. I can't really speak for anyone else but this sure seems like it would be a desirable behavior for many use cases beyond our own.
In a perfect CRM (much like perfect bookkeeping software) I think the ultimate goal is to have the structural components of the software be able to mirror the real world relationships as closely as possible. Unlike object-oriented software design, abstraction is very much the enemy in this endeavor. I would like to have one of my retailers (represented by a company) which operates one or more physical locations (represented by the proposed "location object") to which I can attach the people that we actually call on the phone (represented by contacts). I think we can safely assume that every company has at least one location but a location could have any number of contacts (including zero contacts) and any contact could be our POC for any number of locations, potentially even locations across more than one company. (This structure has the added benefit of allowing us to, for example, easily pull up a report of "everybody I need to contact to run some sort of promotional rate or in-store marketing campaign in Concord, CA, regardless of company or physical location of the contact.")
If the structure was implemented in this way, we would use companies only to represent actual companies, incorporated entities. They could still have parent and children companies, as they do now. We would add "locations" that would each be attached to a single company and then contacts would attach to one or more locations, instead of to a company, itself. The attachment of a contact to a location is, itself, still a bit of an abstraction (as it could represent either "where that guy's desk is" or "what that guy is in charge of") but I don't think this particular abstraction is going to cost us anything in usability or efficacy. If the ambiguity of that attachment proves troublesome, a boolean flag could be included with the attachment to indicate "contact's physical location" or something along those lines. Again, this assumes that any contact can be attached to any number of locations, potentially across companies.
Imagine this scenario: We have Company A with subsidiaries Company B and C. (A is the parent company of B and C in HotSpot CRM, so far so good.) Now imagine that I have a contact: an account manager who works for A (and is physically located at A's headquarters) but manages multiple retail locations for B and multiple retail locations for C. Ok, it's already a ludicrous mess in HotSpot CRM. How do I tell what address to use to ship something to the account manager, versus to one of the stores he reps? Let's make it worse. Imagine that I have another account manager that handles pilot store locations for B and C. (HotSpot CRM is now actively working against my attempts to organize and describe these relationships.) I need to talk to the account manager in charge of B's Fort Worth, TX pilot store (as opposed to B's (or C's) Fort Worth, TX mainline store). This scenario illustrates a scenario where I would actually be better off keeping this information in a spreadsheet...all because the structure of the CRM is abstracted too far away from the real world relationships.
If you've kept reading this far, I thank you for your time. Truly. (This post has gone on way longer than I intended!)
HubSpot uses the domain name which encourages users to put all contacts under that domain umbrella. Unfortunately, we in B-to-B need to identify Contacts at each location under the parent company. For example, "GiantCompany" (giantcompany.com) has 15 locations/business units around the world. We need to capture each location under GiantCompany and work with the Contacts at each location. Furthermore we need to be able to use mapping software to know all companies in a state when we're planning sales trips/meetings. Another issue we have with HubSpot is the lack of a CLONE button! It's so tedious having to enter the address of each Contact manually.
I'm creating a separate company record using the same domain (which HS lets you do) and I create each Company with a unique name such as: ABC Company (HQ; Boston, MA); another would be: ABC Company (Los Angeles, CA), etc. I still need a CLONE button
Our product team, who monitors the forum regularly, can read your specific use case and understand why this would be a useful functionality or change. It also helps other customers facing the same issue to advocate for its implementation on your behalf by upvoting on the thread as well.
You would have one overarching Company with all contacts associated (with the domain automatically linking all relevant contacts to the one Company), and within that Company you would add office locations using a custom object. You could then associate the relevant contacts for that office location and similarly deals, tickets etc. So you would have the high-level Company view showing all contacts, deals, activity, tickets associated with that Company but also an office location specific overview.
We have exactly the same problem. Would be great to see all our contacts for one company on one overarching company record and then be able to assign them office locations. It's great to see Hubspot developing other areas of the product for B2B so this is the next logical downfall of the product to address - please.
I concur with Method Calls description of requiremnts for the system and this rings true with other system that I have used in the past. Most companies deal with one or more other company either as a supplier or customer whereby there are multiple divisions involved that sit beneath the parent company. In many occasions the different divisions are in different countries, therefore have different addresses, different budgets and P & Ls, sometimes even different VAT numbers and Company Registation Numbers.
the best example of the functionality I believe is required is an Amazon account. There is the abilty to register multiple delivery addresses against one account. At the point of placing the order, you choose the correct delivery address from your list and place the order. This is what is required wthin Hubspot. Have the ability to register multiple addresses against a Company and then at the point of creating a quotation you can select the appropriate address from the list.
First of all, I want to thank you and let you know I appreciate the lengthy description and scenario you provided in your initial inquiry. It definitely helps myself understand better your overall goal, as well as provide insight into the many different ways our customers are utilizing the HubSpot CRM.
In regards to a possible resolution for you, there is a new feature in the HubSpot CRM for utilizing parent and child company records. You can read more about this feature here in this article from our HubSpot Academy.
Essentially, you will assign one company record in HubSpot to be the "parent" company, and then will be able to link those other child companies to the parent company on the record itself. This will help when addressing those contacts who are associated with a specific branch or location of the company record in question.
Companies and Contacts are currently too closely coupled (in the programming sense) to allow the kind of flexibility that is required. In the real world, these things are loosely coupled (in the programming sense) and, as such, HubSpot CRM will have to also loosely couple these constructs in order to properly reflect real world relationships.
I tell ya what, though, if HubSpot CRM does implement this, you'll gain my business. Other than this close coupling issue, I actually really like HubSpot CRM. This issue is the only dealbreaker I've seen.
I am in the same boat as you.. We service many multisite franchise locations and having the ability to have some sort of "Locations" option would be ideal.. For now I will work with the Parent Child thing - im honestly not certain on how this will impact me... Regardless I do appreciate your write up as it accurately describes my own business needs as well.
A company in Shopify represents a company that you sell to with B2B. Companies can have multiple locations, each with separate catalogs, payment terms, checkout options, and shipping addresses. When a B2B customer logs in to your store, they choose the location that they're purchasing for and are offered the prices, payment terms, and checkout that you assigned to that company location.
To store custom information about your B2B customer, you can add metafields to a company or a location. Metafields let you customize the functionality and appearance of your Shopify store by letting you save specialized information that isn't usually captured in the Shopify admin. Learn more about metafields.
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