Find your way around CRM

Find the company, person or enquiry you need, and understand where to keep the next customer action.

Before you start: You need access to CRM and the name of a customer, contact or enquiry you want to look up.

Steps

1. Check the workroom in the top bar, then open CRM. Choose the CRM space your team uses. The workroom and CRM space are separate parts of the context; two workrooms can have spaces with the same name.

2. Open Accounts when you are looking for an organisation. An Account brings together the customer relationship; it is not a login or bank account. Search for the company name and open a likely result.

3. Open Contacts when you are looking for a person. Compare their name, company and known details before using the record. The same person may be involved in several purchases, so a new enquiry does not normally require another copy of the Contact.

4. Open Leads when you are looking for an enquiry that needs assessment. Use the list’s Search, open the matching result and read Details and Context. Check what was requested and what still needs an answer.

5. Open Deals when you are looking for a particular possible purchase already being managed through your pipeline. Read its stage and next step. A customer can have more than one deal, each with its own scope and decision.

6. Before you continue, identify the next job. Keep a current summary on the relevant record, use an activity note for something that happened, and create a separate task when someone needs to do something by a due date. “Follow up next week” in a note does not itself assign a task.

Expected result

You can locate the right customer record and distinguish the organisation, person, enquiry and possible purchase before making changes.

Common pitfalls

• Open a result and check its details instead of relying on a shortened title or a similar name.
• Typing a company name into notes does not create a saved Account relationship. Check the actual selected or linked record.
• Creating a record does not establish a sale or permission to send marketing.