The “Company” Settings
-
I know I’m posting a lot here … so forgive me. This is NOT a support question.
I’m just trying to see how anyone would go about adding multiple Company Locations to the CRM.
There’s an option for a “Second Address” and that works great for Companies with 2 locations. However my largest client has 8 locations across the country.
First, is there a configuration to address multiple locationd? I might have missed it or is it possible to duplicate the “Second Address” section somehow a few times … 😆
Failing that I guess I could create each location as a separate “Company”.
Thoughts anyone?
-
No. Franchises are a different animal.
I wouldn’t use a “Franchise” as a location of another organization’s Company entries because a “Franchisor is an established entrepreneur with a licensed business model, while a “Franchisee” is a person or corporation that owns and operates the business using the business model licensed by the “Franchisor”. A “Franchise” describes the business relationship between the “Franchisor” and “Franchisee”.
Think of the “Franchisor”. This entity has a customer … the “Franchisee”. The “Franchisee” is the Lead and/or Customer of the “Franchisor”. They are not the same “Company” for CRM Customer purposes.
In my example Company with different locations. All locations are just remote office locations of the Company.
Their backend software is unified at their main location we’ll call HQ, but their sales, marketing, and compliance staff utilizing the centralized backend are regional.
HQ is where accounting, IT, and administrative personnel are located while sales, customer management, and each regions support and compliance staff are located in different locations.
The Main Location is the centralized HQ and the organizational topography is very flat.
Substitute CEO for HQ in this diagram example and you should be able to get the gist of the organizational structure commonly found within large healthcare corporations. Substitute VP with Client Manager on the yellow level. The bottom tier in blue are all the support staff for each region.
“Production” in this example is their designation for “Lead” who service both an internal customer for use of an external customer.
“Sales/Marketing” is self evident.
“After Sales” is their designation for “Compliance” (one could also consider Compliance as a function of Human Resources).
The primary reason businesses use this organizational model is because of regional differences in logistics, regional customary business practices, culture, regulations, and competition.
There are far more businesses, large and small, that utilize this organizational structure in modern business. In fact the trend is to go even flatter. Every single CRM I’ve tested pretty much ignores organizational structure for anything more than 1 or 2 locations. Imagine the McDonald’s Corporation HQ’d in Illinois. Let’s say they have 26 (yes I know they actually have many more than that) corporate owned stores and thousands of Franchised locations. Do you enter 26 “McDonalds, Inc” or just 1 with location designations?
The business name of the Franchised locations is never McDonalds, Inc in real life so each franchise would have it’s own Customer entry in the CRM. Maybe some of the Franchisee’s own multiple locations as well.
See the conundrum?
I just think the ability to address various locations in the CRM in an easier way is a big benefit over having to manually add a separate entry for each different location based on the same Company.
- The topic ‘The “Company” Settings’ is closed to new replies.
