Autopilot: How does Autopilot handle contact and company records?
What is a contact and company in Autopilot?
Autopilot has two record types: contacts and companies. Contacts are people, and companies are the entities that they are associated with.
Autopilot is intended for marketing to individuals. Therefore, companies play a very minor role in Autopilot. The company record primarily exists to:
- allow you to click easily view how many contacts you have at a particular company; and
- facilitate Autopilot's native Salesforce sync.
For this reason, we do not create company records by default, we only create the association. This keeps your Autopilot database smaller and cleaner.
The only time a company record is created in Autopilot is when you click into it from a contact record (i.e. on an on-demand basis). The only exception to this is when you connect Salesforce. In this case, we create all Accounts in Salesforce as companies in Autopilot. This is required to enable our advanced Salesforce sync. Read below for more information.
What do contacts and companies look like?
Here is an example of a(that belongs to a company):
And here is a company (which is associated with the contact):
How do I associate contacts with companies in Autopilot?
As noted above, in Autopilot you don't add companies directly. They are created by association with a contact that has the company field populated.
You can do this by:
- manually entering the company name in the company field when you add an individual contact;
- mapping a field to Autopilot's company field when you import contacts,track a form, or setup an integration such as Segment Destination.
What are the Salesforce equivalents?
If you've connected to Salesforce, your Salesforce "Lead" and "Contact" records in Salesforce will be treated as "contacts" in Autopilot and your Salesforce Account records will be treated as "companies". Autopilot does not have separate "Lead" and "Contact" records like Salesforce.
However, to make things simpler, Autopilot has dedicated Salesforce Lead and Salesforce Contact lists so you can easily access them. In this case, the term "Lead" and "Contact" means that they are that record type in Salesforce:
You will also see on the contact or company profile a Salesforce sync status to let you know if the record is a Salesforce Lead, Contact or Account record:
