Contacts and Organisations The people and companies behind your deals, and why every contact should hang off an account rather than float on its own.

Deals are what you are working on. Contacts and organisations are who you are working with, and they outlive any single deal.

Organisations

An organisation is the company. Open one and you see the whole commercial relationship in a single place: every deal, every contact, every piece of activity, whether it happened this quarter or two years ago.

When you create one you can set the company name, industry and size, website, phone and address, and a parent company.

Parent Companies

The parent field is the one that earns its keep on larger accounts. If you sell to three divisions of the same group, linking them to a parent lets you see the whole relationship instead of three unrelated records - which is the difference between "we have a small deal with a division" and "this group is a tenth of our pipeline".

Enrichment

An organisation record can be enriched from your connected data providers, filling in what you have not recorded by hand - employee count, revenue range, the technology they run. See AI Lead Generation for connecting those providers.

Contacts

Contacts are people. Each carries a name and job title, email and phone, LinkedIn, the organisation they belong to, whether they are a decision maker, tags, and your own notes.

A contact can be linked to many deals, across years. Their history travels with them, so the person who was a stakeholder on last year's deal arrives at this year's with everything you already knew about them.

Bulk import from CSV or spreadsheet handles column matching and checks for duplicates.

Why Everything Should Hang Off An Account

It is possible to have a contact with no organisation. It is rarely a good idea.

Records that hang off an account inherit its context - territory, relationship history, the other people involved - and roll up to it, so pipeline forecasting and cross-sell see the account rather than a scatter of individuals. A contact floating on its own is invisible to all of that, and usually turns out to be a duplicate of someone already filed properly.

Common Questions

What happens to a contact if I delete a deal it was on? Nothing. Contacts and deals are separate records. The deal goes, the person and their history stay.

Can two contacts share an email? They should not, and import checks for it. Duplicates are the main reason an account view stops being trustworthy.

Is a lead a contact? Not yet. A lead becomes a contact when you convert it, which carries its source across. See Leads.