How HockeyStack Handles Complex Account Hierarchies at Scale

Effective journey analysis in HockeyStack starts with understanding how the companies you’re selling to are organized.

There are two primary hierarchy patterns, each with different implications:

1. Heterogeneous Hierarchies

These organizations operate multiple brands or business units under distinct domains.

Example: Disney owns ESPN.com, Marvel.com, and ABC.com. These are separate digital identities and journeys but are all part of the same parent company.

Challenge: While these domains roll up to a single customer strategically, each brand represents a distinct journey.

Recommendation: We recommend visualizing each domain as its own journey - ESPN, Marvel, and ABC. This avoids forced deduplication or CRM merges, and gives your team clarity across distinct buying motions across subsidiaries.

2. Homogeneous Hierarchies

These are companies with multiple business units or regional teams, and users reflect the local subsidiary they are part of.

Example: Xerox operates as Xerox.com, Xerox.ca, and Xerox.de, and these are seen as separate journeys by default in HockeyStack.

Challenge: The domain does not consistently indicate the correct subsidiary a user belongs to. You could have multiple distinct teams using the same domain (Xerox.com) while running entirely different subsidiaries in different countries. Sometimes, they’re all just operating under the main domain - without any subdomains - making it even harder to distinguish one business unit from another. CRM hygiene won’t fix this, because the ambiguity isn’t in your data - it’s in how the company actually operates.

Recommendation: We visualize the journey for each domain separately, with the awareness that the Ultimate Parent will contain Touchpoints for some of the subsidiaries that operate with the same domain as the ultimate parent.

3. Conclusion

There is no consistent pattern, even within the same organization. The implication here is that there is no perfect algorithm or CRM process that can reliably map domains to account structure universally, no matter how much you “clean” your CRM.

Instead of forcing a perfect CRM account hierarchy structure, we help you make intentional decisions about how to visualize customer journeys:

• Merge accounts by domain to create a clean, unified view across distinct buying motions across subsidiaries deduplicated by domain.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of how Account Merging rules work in HockeyStack.