Under the general tab of a contact I seem to have two company fields. (and i suspect everyone else has also). One that is a search field that is linked to the company entered into the company record and another that connects to the company field that is created when someone fills out the form via a snippet. I understand that this is probably good practice to avoid duplication etc but is confusing to users. Is it possible to change the names of one of the fields?
Let me explain these 2 fields a bit as this may help. If you find a record that has these 2 fields, you may notice that you can just type in one, but the other one has options to ‘search’ out a company. If you utilize ‘company Records’ in your system, and utilize the field that has you ‘search’ out a company, the field that you can just type in will actually disappear, when a contact is tied to a company record.
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It does indeed which is perfect. If I had just saved the record I would have spotted it Many thanks.
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So are you saying that I have to create these companies as records and then go through my whole database and search for each company to tie it to a contact record?
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First off, think carefully why you are wanting to do what you are doing. InfusionSoft’s support for companies is terrible and confusing with rubbish like this dual Company field a classic case in point. Yes, if you want to group contacts by Company this is what you have to do. And any free text Companies you have entered to date are of no value to you in the process. But before you get into all of this, think very carefully if you are involved in B2B marketing or B2C marketing. If you are in B2B marketing, think through what you need from InfusionSoft very carefully, and then you may want to look for consultancy (or another CRM…)
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Peter,
I want to use InfusionSoft for account based marketing,
Workaround solution to my problem found in Step 2 - Create a company record | Max Classic
Sure - just be very careful about how you use these company records. They look like they will be so handy right? Now try adding opportunities to a selected group of companies that you’ve tagged. Oh. You can’t do that. Or try emailing a group of companies’ primary contacts. Oh. You can’t do that. There are a bunch of things you would instinctively think you can do using companies that when you try and do them you will hit a brick wall. And then you’ll reflect on all the months and years of investment in your system that does not now do what you reasonably assumed it would be able to. Or, that might happen if you don’t plan ahead and investigate. I wish I had…
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Yup…painful. Exported the contact database and sorted by company name. You’ll find several versions of the same company name (with LLC, with Inc or Inc., etc). If I found someone with a company id, I copied it to all the records of people in the company.
Then I had to deal with instances of duplicate company records from the variations so I could remove them so they wouldn’t be used again. No Company merge feature.
Then you may find some contacts without the company name but they share the same @company.com in their email address. I used excel to parse out the @company.com, sorted again and then applied the company id.
Eventually I uploaded/ updated the contacts by bringing in the file…but then it messed up all my zipcodes that started with 0…01599 became 1599…sigh.
It goes on and on. That wasn’t the end of it. It’s a constant hassle, time consuming and very frustrating.