Ontraport is built around your contacts. That works well when you sell straight to people, like an online course. But when you sell to businesses, one company can have several people involved and several deals in progress at once. That's what Deals and Companies are for. In this lesson, you'll see what each one does and how they connect.
Deals and Companies are prebuilt apps. Under the hood, they're ready-made custom objects. Click your profile icon, then Apps, and toggle them on. Apps need a Dynamic CMS package. They're separate apps, so you can turn on either one, but they're designed to work together. One caution: turning an app off removes its records, so export them first if you ever need to.
Say a company is renting your event space for its annual conference. You won't just talk to the CEO. You'll work with event planners, a marketing team and someone in accounting. Tracking all of that with contacts alone gets messy fast.
The Companies app gives each organization its own record, with fields like Industry, Annual Revenue and Number of Employees.
Every company record lists its people under Related Contacts. To add someone, set the Company field on their contact record. To add many contacts at once, select them and use Change Field. And when you first turn on Companies, Ontraport automatically creates company records for any contacts that already have a company saved.
Deals are for tracking sales opportunities, especially ones with long sales cycles. Each deal has its own record, with a primary contact, the person you're mainly working with, and the company it's with. It also has sales fields like Deal Value and Expected Win %, and Ontraport works out the Weighted Deal Value for you.
Back in our example, you might have one deal for the space rental, with an event planner as the primary contact, and another for photo and video services, led by someone in marketing. Both deals show up in the company's Deals section. So from the company, you see everyone involved and every deal in progress.
Add Card View, and your deals become a drag-and-drop pipeline, sorted by sales stage. We cover that in the Card View lesson.
To add a deal, open a company, scroll to Deals, and click New deal. Or build a deal form with the deal name, the primary contact's email and the company name. When someone submits it, Ontraport creates the deal, the contact and the company, and links all three for you.
Each app has its own messages, forms and automation maps, under its own item in the navigation bar. To email everyone at a company, go to Companies, then Messages, then New message. The Send email to field is set to Related Contacts, Email.
A deal email goes to the deal's primary contact by default. You can also send it to the deal's owner, or to all the related contacts at the deal's company.
So: Companies groups everyone at an organization, Deals tracks each opportunity with its primary contact and company, and together they show you exactly who's involved in every sale. Next up: navigating between Deals, Contacts and Companies.