Segmenting by Roles and Titles

Learning to segment by a person's Role at a Company, or the Title they hold, can be a helpful tool when it comes to prospecting. Providing the data is consistently updated and accurate, it is possible to use Smart Lists to help target specific people by the Role or Title that they have at the Company they are linked to.

It is worth remembering that the fields of Role and Title are actually fields that are stored in the Company record. This means that in order for a person to have a Role or Job Title, they must be linked to a Company.

Roles can be applied to:

• Company

• Opportunities

• Projects

This means that a single Person can have a different Role in a Company, an Opportunity and a Project at any one time. For example a Person might have the Role of CEO in the Company, a Role of Decision Maker in an Opportunity, and a Role of Final Approver in a Project.

Company Role

This is the Role that someone plays within a Company.

• The Company Role is always selected from a drop-down list of pre-defined Roles.

• The normal convention here is that the Company Role is considered to be what this Person means to us in our efforts to profile our Contacts.

• The Company Role tends to use terms like "Management", "Administration", "Operations" "Finance", "Sales", "Purchasing" etc.

The Company Role field should be used for smart list searches.

This is because the Role field is chosen from a predetermined list of possible roles that are relevant to the client's business. The Title field is considered "free text" which means users can enter whatever they wish, including spelling mistakes. This method lacks consistency.

A good example can be seen in the professional photography industry. When prospecting for new business within advertising companies, the Contacts with the Role of "Art Buyer" are the target for new business prospecting. Hence a smart list would look like this:

Company Job Title

Although this is somewhat similar to a Job Role it differs because the Job Title is a text field rather than a drop-down. This means that it can be less reliable for searching purposes or smart lists. This is because the content tends to be inconsistent.

Just as the Job Role is considered to be what the Contact means to us, the Job Title is used to document the actual job title that the Contact has within their organisation. For example the Role of Art Buyer might have a Job Title called Senior Art Buyer - UK.

• The Job Title is a text field rather than a drop-down.

• This means that it can be less reliable for searching purposes & smart lists.

• The Job Title is used to document the actual job title that the Contact has within their organization.