I've been trying to find some authoritative documentation on the best way to do this but alas, can't seem to find what I'm looking for. We work with a lot of professional organizations (law firms, accounting firms, etc.) that have multiple offices in geographical locations. They're all part of the same company, but have somewhat separate identities because of their location.
Ideally we would like to have one Account record for the overall company, with each separate location tracked AND all of the contacts at that particular office associated with that office so we can easily see who is at each location. We would like to be able to get statistics (i.e. opportunities, projects, etc.) at both levels -- meaning the ability to see how many projects we've worked with at Accounting Firm A AND we'd like to be able to get these same stats for each location for the company. E.g. Accounting Firm A - Location 1, Accounting Firm A - Location 2, etc.
I assumed we would use the Structure and Contacts Detail section, but I'm not seeing how to associate an individual contact with a particular location, etc.
Is this the best approach? Any instructions on associating a contact with one of these offices?
Like
Dear Damon,
You can either use functionality of Field Sales to create tasks/visits for each contact based on their location or add new address detail in the Account section with Office field which would determine the name of the office. When building statistics for any section you may use office to determine for which department is this statistics built.
Dear Damon,
You might also create different Accounts with type "Our company" and set different addresses for each account. Each employee will be bonded to its own account, general statistics can be viewed via Dashboards section and each every dashboard can be set up for a certain office.
Angela, thanks for the comments. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I needed to be. This is NOT for OUR company, it is the manner in which we would structure all accounts. Again, the majority of our clients are law firms and accounting firms; many of which have multiple offices. The most important aspects for this are:
a) our ability to see ALL of the contacts associated with that Account, but also know which office they belong to (as some of these offices are widely dispersed geographically);
b) ability to see all Opportunities and Projects under the firm so that we can get a good handle on where to spend our marketing & sales efforts.
I believe there are two routes I could go:
1) setting up each office as it's own account and linking them via Connected To
2) creating a separate object, say "Office". Adding a detail at the Account level and adding each office via this mechanism.
I'm leaning towards #2, but trying to understand the advantages/disadvantages of both routes -- as I don't want to "undo" built-in functionality that might actually help in us seeing a clear picture on this. So far though, I'm not really seeing a clear path forward on route #1 -- disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages of #2...especially as it relates to assigning individuals to each office but having visibility at the "parent company" Account.
Damon Hacker,
Thank you for specifying your task. You may use "departments" lookup - add departments for each account and bind employees for certain department. To specify the address you might use my 1st comment. If a certain Account has 6 offices it will have 6 addresses, each one with "department" name field. Then you may add additional field to projects and opportunities that will be required and name it "Department" - thus there will be no need for creating a separate object. Is this a suitable solution for you?