05. Contact Management (More Details) [14:18]
Description: This video provides additional details for the Contact Management area of the Core2 CRM.
http://www.productivecomputing.com/video/video_library/Core2/05_Contact_Management_More_Details.flv
Transcript:
In this segment we are going to review more details of Contact Management. Specifically adding, editing, and deleting contacts. Finding, sorting, and linking contacts. A little bit about list view and the home record.
0:25 So adding a contact is done by clicking this button here. In this case, let’s add a company. And I’ll click this button here which indicated that this contact is a company. Let’s add a phone number, and let’s add a web address. And we can put a main address here as well. So we’ve just added a contact and that contact is a company or an organization. No if I want to add an individual to that company, the best way to do that is to click this button. Now in this case, I don’t have an existing individual that I want to link to this company, I want to create a brand new one. So I will click this new button here to add a new contact. So I add Fred Wilson, notice that it already knows that I want to link it to Acme. And we’ll put his number in there with an extension, and we’ll throw in a work email address. And when I click done, you will see that says linked to contacts 1, Mr. Fred Wilson and he’s linked to Acme. Click done and we can see Acme is still the record we were on and Fred Wilson is now linked to that record.
2:20 Now let’s say I just wanted to add an individual to the system without actually linking it to a company. The best way to do that is by just clicking this button here. Sally Smith, I can put the title, and add a quick fax. So now Sally Smith is in the system but she is not linked to any particular company. Now if I scroll back to Acme Company and I now want to add Sally to Acme, I can click here and put in the word Sally where is says find and link existing contact. So I just put Sally here and hit tab and it shows that I do have a Sally in the system. If I click here, this will now link Sally to Acme and she will be in the same area as Fred. So now I have Acme Company with linked Sally and Fred.
3:39 Now let’s do a find for Johnson. So I have a Kelly Johnson in the system already. Kelly works for Productive Computing. Let’s say for example Kelly also works for Acme Company, let’s say she’s a free lance sales and support person. I can click add contacts here, put in Acme, and now Kelly is linked to Acme and Productive Computing. Again if I click down here I will immediately navigate to the related contact and we can see Acme has 3 individuals working. Click on Kelly and Kelly works for Productive and Acme. So there’s no limit to how many connections you can make. So it’s many to many, I can have one company linked to many individuals, I can have one individual linked to many companies and I can have many companies linked to many individuals. So we learned about adding a contact and linking contacts.
4:51 Editing a contact is also very easy. And if I wanted to change it to Jones, you simple just edit the record. And when ever you click outside of any particular box or field, the Core will immediately save that record. It’s continuously saving all your changes as you’re doing them. I wanted to edit a company name. Edit it once and where ever that company name is viewed, it will be updated because all the records are connected in such a way that you’re only entering the data in one location.
5:37 So now let’s talk a little bit about finding a record. There are a few ways to do this. The easiest way is to click here on the find button like we’ve been doing. And what this find does is look through the company name, the individuals, the email addresses, the regular addresses and the phones. It even includes the key words which are found under the general tab when it’s doing its find. Now if I wanted to find every individual that was related to Productive, I could just put in prod. I don’t have to put in the full word Productive. The Core understands that you only need the first few characters and it will begin looking at that. So it found 3 entities for Productive and of course I can use this button to click on those entities. Now let’s find 123 which as you know if the area code for a lot of the numbers I’ve been entering. In fact Fred Wilson and Sally Smith have area code 123; they also have an extension 123. But look here, Acme’s first digits of their phone number, their 800 number, is 123. So it looks through the phone numbers as well.
6:54 Now there is another way you can do a find and there’s 2 or 3 ways you can get to it. You can hit Ctrl+F on the keyboard; control F on the keyboard will actually put you into find mode. And it doesn’t bring up a little box like this find; it simply blanks the record out and puts you into find mode. And at this point you can type anywhere, essentially anywhere, to do a find. So if I want to find Productive here, and I want it to only look at the company, that will do a find in that way. Or for instance, let’s say I wanted to find by a certain state, and I only want to find within that box, I click find and now it will find all the contacts or entities in California. I can also get to that find under here. So that is the exact same thing. So I can hit Ctrl+ F, I can get to it under there or I can get to it under view. Called Find Mode, notice how it shows you Ctrl +F will get you there. You can also click here; the magnifying glass will also get you into find. And the reason why there are so many way to get to it, is that finding a contact is one of the primary things you do in a database. You’re continuously going to find, so the more ways you can get to it the better. I prefer Control F, that’s certainly the quickest way.
8:23 Finding is to gather a group of individuals or contacts and bring them into a set that you are looking at. For instance, right now I have Productive Computing and if I scroll through the rolodex, I’ve got a Johnny Smith and Kelly Jones. This is what is called my found set. Also indicated here; found 3, total 6. So I have 6 contacts, but only 3 are in my found set. So that’s important if you want to print a list of contacts or if you are doing a campaign and you want to a certain find for a group of contacts, that’s why the found set is important. Now let’s say I want to find all my contacts and bring them all into the found set. The best way to do that is here under records. And there is an option Show All Records. Now when I do that the found count goes away and now I’m left with a total of 6. Again you can see that here; my current found set is 6, my total records are 6. The easiest way to get to that in the future is to type Ctrl+J on the keyboard. That’s also another big command that you will be using a lot of.
9:33 So let’s go find Productive Computing, and now notice when I have more than one record that appears in my find, the Core brings you into a list view first because there is more than one found. But what if I did a find for Kelly; since there is only one Kelly contact in my system there is no reason to bring you into list mode. It just leaves you right on the detail view. Let’s do a find again for Productive; so now I have three here in my found set. What if I wanted to sort these entities? I can go under records here and click Sort Records. Then a box appears allowing me to sort by any of these fields. Now these are the fields on the current layout. I also have the option of sorting by the current table; we won’t talk about that at this time. For now let’s keep it on current layout which means everything that I’m looking at here. And if I wanted to sort by last name, I just simply double click here. It was already sorting by full name so let’s clear that one. So it’s going to sort by last name, now click sort, and it will sort A-Z by last name. Now in this case, there is no last name to Productive Computing, so that of course that is going to go on top. Then it’s going to sort by Jones and then Smith. Now what if I went back here to sort again? Instead of last name ascending, let’s do last name descending which is Z-A. I will click sort and now the names begin with the Smith record on top, the Jones record after that and then the blank record for last name here on the bottom. So sorting is just a matter of going to Records and clicking sort or using Ctrl+S.
11:40 So we learned about Ctrl+F for Find. We learned about Ctrl+J to find All. And we just learned about Ctrl+S for Sorting. And those are the three biggys. Those are the commands you are going to be using over and over and over again. Ok, so let’s do a Ctrl+J here which will find all my records. And then I will go into list view. Now notice that we have some company names in bold and some that are not bold or black I should say. The ones that are black are the actually company contact records and the ones that aren’t are the individuals. And you can see her company, individual, individual, company, individual, individual. Now in this list view I can also click these titles and that will sort by the column. And of course as we saw earlier I can go and click any one of these to zoom to that contact record. So list view can be handy to look at multiple contacts at the same time. Again list view, if I’m on record two here Fred Wilson, I go to list view and you can see that there’s a black line indicating that I’m on record two. If I click here on Kelly Jones, I’m on Kelly Jones. But I can use the rolodex here to switch records and in list view I also have a rolodex to switch records. It’s really one in the same, just a different way to look at the contacts.
13:13 Now the Home Record; if I click Home Record it will bring me back to the Productive Computing record because I’ve allocated Productive Computing as the Home Record. The Home Record is important because you’ll want to assign notes and tasks and events to the Home Record, to the company or organization that you are working at. So that’s why it’s important to create one. The second reason why this is important is because the Home Record is what is going to appear in the header of the letter and the fax on the correspondence that you send. And again to set that up, you go to Preferences, Global Settings and here is the information on the Home Record. You can also put your logo, your company logo here, that logo will appear at the top of the letter as well as the top of the Core itself. So let’s say I wanted to change the Home Record from Productive to Acme, I put in the number for Acme, will change here, click done. And now when I click Home Record, Acme is my new Home Record.