How are other folks handling entry of contacts for big companies where you have local independent offices – like Allstate or State Farm. Are you creating unique locations within the company record or are you adding personnel and then using the local offices information for the individual’s work location?

Can anyone see advantages or disadvantages of either option or am I just giving this too much thought?

Thanks,

SB

Hi Scott: I worked with one company that had three locations, so that’s what we did: we made three locations for the company and then tagged the employees by location. The benefit is seeing everyone in your personnel list, plus just having good data (where everyone is correctly part of the same company) in case we cook up any future features for company pages. I’d like to eventually make the company pages more like aggregators for the individuals who work for that company. If anyone has any other requests related to this, I’m all ears!

Hey Adam,

How do I assign a contact to a particular location? I have multiple locations created for a company, and multiple people assigned to that company – but for all of them it displays the main address. I can’t seem to figure out how to choose a different location for each.

Thanks
SB

Hmmm…. for the current contact detail design, I had experimented with a dropdown to choose which location the individual worked at. This never really came up from a user, so it kind of fell to the backburner. I’m working on some contact detail tweaking, so I’ll think about how to get this in there. Thanks!

I was interested in the progress on this one. I have several companies that each have different divisions. Right now the contact say William Lyon – LA or William Lyon – Las Vegas. It is not very clean. Do you recommend a cleaner way?

One way to do it would be to set up each division as a separate company. That way the contact records would be clean. When we do get the company location selection in there, you can just modify the company names for those contacts. Would that do the trick?

I think that is the same way as I have it now. The company name is William Lyon – LA Division and William Lyon -Corporate. Is that what you are talking about?

Hi Jason. Yes, for the time being, that’s what I’d recommend. It’ll probably be a little while before we get to Contact Detail tweaks, but taht will put you in good shape to consolidate the companies once we add the ability to choose a location from multiple company locations.

Hmm, having the divisions as separate companies is not that bad. It would perhaps improve if companies (organsiations) could be made part of a bigger organisations, either by special affiliations or analog how persons are made employees of a company.

You can certainly affiliate the companies, but of course you then lose the ability to share contact info between them. But of course, you don’t want to share all the contact info, which is why you would want to split them up into divisions in the first place.

So far this seems like a pretty good workaround for what may be an edge case. If it seems like a more prominent situation, we’ll certainly spend more time thinking about it.