In our last lesson, we walked through building company lists. Now, let's cover mapping company relationships and ownership structures.

Why do these structures matter? That startup you're targeting might actually be owned by a Fortune 500 company with specific budget cycles and decision-making processes. Or that enterprise account you've been working might have 127 subsidiaries you didn't know existed - each one a potential expansion opportunity.

With HG Insights, you can uncover these hidden relationships.

🔧 Setting Up Corporate Hierarchy Enrichment

Let's set up corporate hierarchy enrichment to see how this works.

Add a new column and select Enrich Company, then choose HG Insights: Find company corporate structure. Map the company domain field from your existing data.

For output fields, HG Insights gives us several relationship types:

• Group HQ identifies the ultimate parent company - Alphabet for Google or Berkshire Hathaway for GEICO
• Is Group HQ tells us if this company IS the ultimate parent
• Is Corporate Parent indicates if this is the immediate parent entity
• Is Domestic Parent shows the parent within the same country for international structures
• Is Lower Level Entity identifies subsidiaries and child companies
• Children gives us the full list of subsidiaries and divisions

Each data point helps us understand where this company sits in the corporate ecosystem and who controls budget and decision-making.

🎯 What Hierarchy Levels Mean for Your GTM Strategy

The Group HQ is your ultimate decision-maker. Enterprise-level budget decisions, strategic technology choices, and compliance requirements flow from here. If you're selling to Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Corporation is the Group HQ making platform-wide decisions.

The Corporate Parent is the immediate parent entity. It might be a regional holding company or business unit with its own P&L.

Domestic Parent becomes crucial for international companies. A German subsidiary might have a European parent handling regional decisions, even though the ultimate Group HQ is in the United States.

Subsidiaries are individual companies, divisions, and business units where your actual users sit. They might have local budgets but are constrained by parent company policies.

Sister Companies are other subsidiaries under the same parent. These are expansion opportunities where you can leverage existing relationships.

📊 Real Example: Microsoft

Let's see this with Microsoft. When you run corporate hierarchy enrichment on Microsoft, you discover over 100 subsidiaries spanning regional sales offices to specialized technology divisions.

This reveals opportunities you never would have found. Microsoft has subsidiaries focused on gaming, cloud services, productivity software, and hardware - each with different buying processes and budget cycles.

Export this subsidiary list to a new table and run additional enrichments to understand technology stack, employee count, and decision-makers at each entity. The single account becomes an entire ecosystem of opportunities.

💡 Corporate Hierarchy as a Competitive Weapon

Put this all together, and we see that corporate hierarchy data can become your competitive weapon.

When you close a deal with one Microsoft subsidiary:

• You have a reference case for other subsidiaries
• You understand the parent company's technology preferences
• You can negotiate volume discounts across the corporate family

Here's one more strategic benefit of corporate hierarchy data: coordinated messaging. When the Group HQ announces a major initiative like digital transformation, that creates relevant context for every subsidiary conversation you have. Your messaging can align with the parent company's priorities while addressing each subsidiary's specific needs.

And importantly, this data helps you avoid embarrassing outreach mistakes. Nothing undermines credibility faster than having three different reps from your company contacting three subsidiaries of the same parent with inconsistent or conflicting messages.

✅ Conclusion

Understanding corporate hierarchies gives you a strategic advantage most salespeople miss. You'll discover expansion opportunities within complex organizations, align your approach with decision-making structures, and ultimately close more deals by seeing the complete picture of who owns what.

In our next lesson, we'll explore Territory Management and how to effectively organize your accounts.