Contact Management

An essential component of a CRM system is contact management. With the new release, SELLSATION has taken a big step towards perfect contact management and has significantly expanded the possibilities of linking contacts or contact persons with customers and / or projects. The following functions have been expanded in SELLSATION:

• M:N relationship of persons to customers
• Unlimited connections of persons to projects
• Show the history of a contact person
• Views that have been changed or expanded
  • Detail view - Projects / History tab
  • Detail view - tab contact person
  • New contact overview / contact detail view
• Capturing of "independent" contacts

The following link leads you to the article that deal with the Buying Center, please scroll down to get the desired information. Click here to learn about these functions.

M: N relationships between people and customers

What sounds very technical is simply explained: one contact person can be assigned to several customers. For example, a CEO of one company could hold another function as a Board Member in another company.

You can also save the start of the connection as a date or freely enter the end when the connection ends. This creates an employment or connection history for contact persons in SELLSATION.

The advantage for you is that contact persons who leave a customer's company no longer have to be deleted or entered in the system multiple times. They will remain as a "free" contact person in your system, along with the complete history. If this contact person is hired by another company, you can simply assign this existing contact person to the "new" company.

Unlimited connections of people to projects

You can now assign all persons who exist in your SELLSATION database as well as new persons, who you create at the moment of the connection, to a project. You can choose if the contact person should be connected to the project as an external consultant or directly to the company linked to the project.

You can also assign the external person as an individual to the project or as a representative of one of the companies to which this person is already assigned to.

Show the history of a contact person

In addition, we have expanded the activity history so that the tasks, appointments, notes etc. can now be explicitly assigned to contact persons. These activities are now listed in the new contact details view for the respective person. Additionally, the entries of the assigned persons can be displayed in the timeline of a customer or project:

• Show entries of selected contacts
• Show entries of all contacts
• Hide all entries

Views that have been changed or expanded

In the course of the enhancement, the original views were adapted to the new functionality.

Detail view - Projects / History tab

In the Customer Detail View (or Customer Without Projects view), you will still see all contacts associated with the customer. What is new is:

• The company name is displayed again above the contact person list. This is not very important in this view, but in the project view you will see that this additional display contains very valuable information.
• The small filter symbol with which you can choose between the display modes for displaying the new, contact-related activities. You will find more on these topics below.

In the customer detail view (view of all projects), all contact persons are listed that are related to projects in which the customer is involved. Here you can also see whether the contact person is external and not directly linked to the customer:

As you can see, this view shows you all contact persons according to their relationship to the company (Premium AG and AAA Group). In addition, the view shows you all external contacts which are connected to the project. The customer company in the list above is the one shown in the upper part of the screen. In our case the Premium AG.

The detailed view of a single project behaves in a similar way, with the restriction that not all contacts from all projects are displayed, but only those of the selected project.

The navigation options for the contacts are:

• These switches next to the contact persons allows you to show or hide their personal activity history. These switches are only visible if you have selected the "Select entries manually" option in the filter symbol (see above)
• The pencil symbol leads you directly into the editing window of the contact person.
• If you are in the "All projects" or "Customer without project" views, you can use the "x" to:
  • document the employment relationship (connection to customer) of the contact person as completed, or
  • completely delete the contact person

In the following dialog you can enter the end of the employment relationship or delete the contact person completely.

• If you are in the project view area, then you can use it to:
  
  • remove the contact from the project, or
  • delete the contact entirely.

Detailed view - Contact person tab

Within the contact view tab you will find all of the information about the contact person in detail. The function or the selection of which contact persons are displayed or which navigation options you have here correspond to the steps described above.

What is new is the list view, which shows the contact persons in a more compact way, especially for customers with a large number of contacts:

We have also integrated the buying center of a sales project in this tab. If you have the details of a project in focus, this view offers the choice between " Contact Person " and " Buying Center ". You can find information about the Buying Center here.

The Buying Center view can also be displayed in a list format.

New contact overview / contact detail view

The new contact overview can be found in the customer menu as a separate menu item "Contacts". However, the prerequisite is that your administrator has activated the contact overview. He or she can do this in the administration under customer data by clicking the checkbox:

The administrator can adjust which columns are displayed:

Please note that in the Company Name column, several customer names can be listed in the line of a contact person. These are separated by commas, since it is now possible to assign one contact person to several companies. In the example above, this would be the case for this contact person:

Bryndis Braukschulte is assigned to both the AAA Group and the ARTADA GmbH .

The blue texts are hyperlinks that you can click to see the contents behind them in detail. The following ways are possible here:

• Clicking on the name of the contact person (in this case Braukschulte, Bryndis) takes you directly to the detailed view of the contact person
• Clicking on the name of a company (in this case either AAA Group or ARTADA GmbH) takes you directly to the detailed view of the respective company. Here you see two different hyperlinks, one for each company.

Detailed view of the contact person (contact):

The detailed view is divided into several areas.

The details of the contact person:

The upper left area shows the details - such as telephone number (s), email address (es), etc. - related to the contact person. The icons next to the name of the contact have the following functions:

• changes the privacy settings (include in campaigns or not)
• opens the window for editing the data
• deletes the contact person
• exports the data in VCF format (Business Card)
• shows the connections or employment history of the contact
• this enables you to create new connections to customers or projects

In the picture below you can see an example of an employment / conneciton history of the contact person. You can see that Mr. Braukschulte was assigned to the AAA Group on 10.10.2017 and this assignment still exists. Furthermore, he has the customer role "Board Member / CEO" at this company. On May 23, 2019, he was also assigned to the company ARTADA GmbH. A customer role was not assigned to this connection.

Connection history to customer or project

On the right you can see which customers or projects the contact person is connected with. The House symbol stands for the company connection. The entries without a symbol show the project to which the contact person is connected.

The navigation options are:

• By clicking on the entries in this list, you can navigate directly to the data of the customer or the project
• This allows you to edit the contact data in relation to the respective company or project. Here you can assign project and/or customer roles, or change the connection time.
• Clicking the "X" ends the connection to the customer or project. If you remove the connection to a customer, you also have the option of entering the time of the termination.

The "History" and "Project Overview" tabs

In the picture above you can see the content of the history. As with customers or projects, this is the chronological listing of activities and tasks that are related to the contact person shown.

In the example above, only the connected companies to which the contact belongs to can be viewed.

If we switch to the tab "Project overview", all projects to which the contact person is connected to can be seen:

Here you can click on the blue name of the customer or on the blue name / date of the project in order to look at the project data in detail.

Capture "independent" contacts

What is new is that you can now create contact persons regardless if they are connected to a customer or not. This can be done in two ways:

• By clicking on the '+' on the top left corner of the new contact overview
• By clicking on the '+' on the dialog to add external contacts to a project / buying center (see also buying center)

Contact persons that are created in this way can be added to several customers or projects at a later point in time as described above.