Contacts and Companies: The Growth Stack Pillars
When developing any strategy, it's important to understand the pillars supporting your purpose. Your contacts and companies are the pillars that guide your marketing and sales teams forward.
I like to think about it this way: Your product or service is the story you're trying to tell. Your contacts are the main character of that story, and your companies are the supporting characters that give you a full picture of the contacts.
While these characters can exist on their own, they're most successful in telling the story when they tell it together. This sounds similar to how we've been talking about the Growth Stack, doesn't it?
As discussed in the first Contacts: A Growth Stack Story post, your contacts are weaving themselves through your growth stack. From the first time they enter your database to their continued relationship with your company, they're interacting with each piece of the growth stack.
While on the surface your pillars may seem like two very large lists inside of HubSpot, they're much more than that.
Regardless of your industry, product, or goals, your strategy starts with the individual: trying to convert real people into loyal customers and evangelists of your brand.
But let’s say your organization is focused on B2B. In this case, you're going to live and breathe in the world of companies with contacts nestled under them. The company data you're looking at is just as important to both your marketing and sales as the trait of an individual contact.
This is why you need both pillars to guide success.
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Implementing the Pillars in HubSpot
With contacts and companies in the center of our growth stack, let’s find some ways to use HubSpot to support these pillars.
There are three key factors you need to consider when it comes to how contacts and companies support your strategy:
- HubSpot Company Insights
- Contact/company association
- Deals
HubSpot Company Insights
HubSpot gathers information through various sources on the web to create an enormous database of company information. When you add a company with a domain to HubSpot, the software searches the web for more information about the company.
If any additional information is found, then that data will automatically and immediately be added to the company record.
Take a look a this example where the Account Phone was added.
How does this drive your success forward? Insights provides the ability to create a more efficient process of gathering the most amount of information on the companies your contacts are associated with.
Associating contacts and companies
Speaking of the relationship between contacts and companies, the second key pillar is automatically associating companies and contacts. The Growth Stack aims to make your business more efficient. By automatically associating contacts and companies, you're eliminating what previously would have been manual work.
Whether you're the marketer discovering new ways to reach your buyer personas or a sales rep looking at a current deal, missing the whole picture could mean losing revenue.
How does this association work? When turned on, the association looks at the email domain in a contact's email address and matches this with the company domain name property on the company record. When you add a new contact while this setting is turned on, two things can happen:
- If a new contact is added and a company already exists with a domain name matching the domain in the contact's email address (@domain.com), then the contact will be automatically associated with that company.
- If a company does not already exist to match the domain of the contact's email address, a new company record will be created and populated.
After your contacts are associated with their companies, we're brought to how these pillars together create revenue: deals.
Deals
Deals are one of the most importants ways you'll create revenue for your business.
When adding a new deal to HubSpot, you can associate a company and contact with the deal, bringing the whole process together.
More than one contact on this deal? No worries — you can associate more contacts to the deal as well as show all the contacts associated with that particular company.
When a deal gets created and you have access to all the information that exists for this company and its associated contacts, you're using the full strength of the HubSpot Growth Stack. Isn't it beautiful?
Want to learn about tracking your sales in HubSpot? Check out this learning module here.
Originally published Aug 17, 2017 11:00:00 AM, updated October 21 2020