Basic Contact Management

CRM Startup Series: Basic Contact Management At its center Dynamics CRM is a method to manage and organize contacts. That's a task that each company struggles with ultimately, and it's an essential advantage of shifting from Outlook or spreadsheets. That's why the most excellent article in our CRM Startup series is going to explain to you what it seems like to handle your contacts in CRM.

 Contacts vs. Accounts 

The base of any CRM system – Microsoft Dynamics or oppositely – is the contact list. You've seemingly already got one of these in  Gmail, Outlook, or another contact handler. However, a CRM system enables you to customize the data you want to understand about your contacts.

You can also make any piece of data needed, so you know everyone on the group is getting the data you require, instead of what Google or Microsoft think you want. Once you have those contacts collecting in your system, you can build organizations to link those contacts. In CRM spans, those organizations are named "accounts," but they can be any organization you want to link contacts. They can even be similar accounts that previously live inside your accounting system.

Once you've built an account and linked the appropriate contacts to it, you'll notice that it's a lot simpler to track down a  figure or phone number out who you want to get in touch with. You'll also be doing your Rolodex accessible to the whole organization – and vice versa – so that there's no longer emailing contact info around.

Connections and Activities

Connecting contacts to an account is as easy as selecting a parent company for that communication, and it has benefits beyond creating it more straightforward to keep track of them entirely. It also provides everything you do with that contact to be tracked inside that account. So, anyone that compares out the record for ABC Company will see that your business rep communicated to the CEO alternatively of wondering what's occurring.

 You can track emails, phone calls, text messages, appointments, and tasks. It's a fabulous way to trace activities that would typically go unrecorded, and it's still more convenient if you're using Outlook. Every email you transmit via Outlook can be 'Set Regarding' and 'Tracked'  a contact, account,  or nearly any other thing in Dynamics CRM. Once that's achieved, the whole email chain will give us as activities, which will flow up from accounts into contacts and provide the organization with real-time knowledge of what's occurring with your clients.