Account and contact records, as well as related lead and opportunity records, hold much of the primary information that your team has or will collect. Depending on the nature of your business, you may use one or both types of records. Microsoft CRM continually refers to accounts, contacts, and customers, so it's important to keep the terms straight. Accounts are companies, contacts are people, and customers can be either companies or people.
Assuming for the moment that you sell to other businesses and that you use account records, you'll also need to use contact records. Each account record can have multiple people (contact records) associated with it. The larger the account, the more people you likely need to track.
If you sell only to individuals, you may never actually use account records to track your customers. In all likelihood, however, you'll want to track more than just your customers in Microsoft CRM. For example, keeping track of your company's vendors in the same database is useful. Your competitors may also be candidates for their own account records if you don't create actual competitor records for them. If you're strictly a B2C company, you will probably still encounter situations like these where you need the account record.
In this chapter, we describe how you add new accounts and contacts and how best to use and access those records after you create them.
You can add a contact record that stands alone, or you can add one that is associated with an account record. Adding or editing contact records is almost identical to the process you follow for account records.
Tip
Contacts have a list view just as accounts do. You can access this view from the Sales, Marketing, or Service areas. The Contact database is the same for all three areas of CRM, so all your users access the same contact records.
You can add or manually edit individual contacts in the same way that you handle account. Contact records have a Parent Account field just as account records do. If you do business only with individuals, you may never need the Parent Account field. You should use it, however, if you need to associate a person with a company. Note that you can associate many different people with the same company (account record).
In addition to the manual entry of contact records, Microsoft CRM also comes with an automated wizard-based system for importing contact records. Although the wizard was designed with Outlook files in mind, the import facility can handle other types of data, such as text (.txt) files. See Appendix B for more information on importing data.
Warning
If you need to perform a significant amount of importing or something more complex than just basic contact information, investigate the third-party import products discussed in Chapter 27.
The first step in getting started with CRM is to stock it with all the organizations and people you deal with. If you already have the information organized in data files (in Excel, other CRM systems, or accounting data files, for example), you'll be doing some importing. We discuss importing data and converting it to Microsoft CRM's format in Appendixes A and B. If the data is stored in your head (or, worse, someone else's head), you're in for some typing. The basic entities into which this data will go are accounts and contacts.
As mentioned, accounts are companies. Subaccounts may be divisions of the main company or separate physical locations of the same company. Anything you add in Microsoft CRM, you can edit. And anything you add can be deleted, but a better practice is to deactivate an account rather than delete it. Deactivating an account is like making it go dormant. If you deactivate an account, you can always resurrect the information later if you discover you need it. Deletion is forever.
Note
The ability to add, edit and/or delete records is a function of your security rights.
Tip
Old-timers who used version 1 may be looking for the Quick Create function — the lazy person's way to create new records using only required fields. This function bit the dust in version 4.
Every account you add will almost always be associated with one or more contacts (people), so you'll find it easier to create the contact records before you create the account record. You can then easily link the two.
You can get to your account records from each of the three application modules — Sales, Marketing, and Service — and even from the Workplace. In each of those modules, Accounts appears up at the top of the navigation pane.
Each account record has four related tabs: General, Details, Administration, and Notes. You can access these tabs to create a new account, as follows:
At the top of the navigation pane, select Accounts.
The Accounts window appears on the right.
On the window's toolbar, click the New button.
The Account: New window appears, as shown in Figure 13-1.
The General tab has most of the critical contact information for your account, including the required field Account Name. Most of the fields on the General tab are self-explanatory, but the other three tabs deserve a little discussion.
The Details tab contains mostly financial information, such as annual revenue and a company's stock symbol if it's publicly traded. It's the kind of stuff you'll get if you receive data from Dun & Bradstreet or other similar services or list providers. This provides useful demographic information about the account, assuming someone in your organization does the research to fill in the information and keeps it current. The Details tab is shown in Figure 13-2.
The Territory field on the Details tab is one of the most important. Many companies, particularly national or international ones, divide their business into territories usually based on geography. Salespeople, or teams of sales-people, are assigned to each territory and their revenue is tracked.
Territories should be set up in the Settings module. (See Chapter 5 for more information.) Then you can manually select a territory for an account by clicking the magnifying glass to the right of the Territory field and selecting the appropriate territory.
You can also customize the system so that each new account is automatically assigned to a territory or so that accounts are reassigned automatically when it's time to reorganize your territories. See Chapter 9 for instructions on creating workflow rules that can automate these types of processes. Effective design and implementation of workflow may require the services of an experienced dealer or developer.
The Administration tab, shown in Figure 13-3, is a catchall for accounting, marketing, and service information. The Owner field is the only required field and is filled in automatically with the name of the user creating the record. So, by default, the record owner is the person who enters the information. If that isn't the way it works in your organization, you can reassign the record to another user by clicking the magnifying glass to the right of the Owner field and selecting the proper user.
The Originating Lead field automatically keeps track of the source of this account record if it came from a converted lead record. (We tell you how to convert a lead record in Chapter 12.) Your marketing department will definitely want this field filled in accurately so that they can understand which marketing efforts are generating revenue.
Tip
The Originating Lead field is a system-generated field, so you can't enter anything into it. To be filled in, the account must be generated from a lead when it is qualified.
It's a great advantage for salespeople to know at least a little bit about their clients' billing and credit situations. The fields in the Billing Information section are prime candidates for integration with whatever accounting system is used at your company. This integration will probably require some custom work and is usually the domain of the business partner who sold you the software.
The fields in the Contact Methods and Marketing Information sections regulate how you market to and correspond with this account. Keeping track of this is increasingly important as more and more laws go into effect regulating how we market to prospects and clients.
Even if you aren't using the Service module, the Service Preferences section contains basic service-related information that can help you tailor manual or automatic responses to service requests. For example, this is a simple place to keep track of the equipment your customer has and who your preferred technician is whenever service is needed.
The Notes tab starts out as a blank slate: a large area where you can begin typing. You should use the Notes section to record general information about the account. After you finish typing your notes, just navigate to another section. This is one of the few areas in CRM where you don't have to tell the system to save your work. It does so automatically. In fact, CRM also records who created the note and timestamps it. Figure 13-4 shows a Notes tab after a few notes have been entered.
Tip
Everything you write in the Notes section is public information — and CRM doesn't have a spell checker or grammar checker. Pay attention to your writing style, and don't enter anything that you wouldn't want a client or a judge to see.
Tip
When you've finished filling in data fields in the various tabs, you could click the Save and Close button with each tab. But you can often save some steps by just clicking Save (the disk icon), which activates related actions on the navigation pane.
An account record may be the parent of other account records, and those other account records are called children. A child record is also referred to as a subaccount. Typically, you use the subaccount system to subordinate one record to another. An example is when you're dealing with a company that has multiple locations. The headquarters would be the parent account, and each regional location would be a subaccount. By relating the accounts this way, you can use the reporting system to consolidate, subtotal, or total revenue for all the related accounts.
The General tab (refer to Figure 13-1), which is the default window when you are creating a new account record, contains the field that relates one account to another. This field is labeled Parent Account and lists all account records in the system. There is no limit to the number of levels of parenting. In other words, every parent account can have multiple children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.
As you create this structure, the best approach is to map out the relationships between the accounts and begin at the top. First enter the parent account and then enter the children. As you enter each child account, click the magnifying glass next to the Parent Account field and select one parent to connect each "generation."
Almost no matter what your role is, as a user of CRM you'll find yourself looking up accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities on a regular basis. (Okay, if you're a customer service rep, you may not spend much time checking out sales forecasts or opportunities. In fact, your access rights might even preclude you from doing so.) For the most part though you can locate records in Microsoft CRM in two basic ways: the Find function and the Advanced Find function.
You can access the Find function from any of the main windows. Using Find is the simplest and fastest way to locate a record. Figure 13-5 shows a typical list view as a result of a search for accounts beginning with the letter "e."
At the top of the window is an unlabeled, blank search field. The magnifying glass to the right of the field, actually sets this function in motion. You can locate an account in several ways:
Enter the first few letters of the account name in the search field and click the magnifying glass. All the accounts beginning with those letters appear in the list. Click the account in the list to navigate to that account record.
Tip
The Find function isn't case sensitive, so you needn't worry about uppercase and lowercase.
Enter part of the account name preceded or followed by an asterisk (*). If you want to locate all the companies that have LLC in their names, you can enter LLC in the search field. This locates all the accounts that start with LLC. If you think LLC may occur in the middle or at the end of the name, however, you can generalize your search by using *LLC*.
Click a letter of the alphabet at the bottom of the grid and scroll through the listing of all companies that begin with that letter. This approach is useful if you have a small database — but if you have hundreds of accounts that span multiple pages, one of the other techniques is easier.
The Find function enables you to locate an account record quickly if you know the name of the account, or part of the name as long as that's the only criterion by which you're searching. Advanced Find, however, provides a more powerful search capability, enabling you to locate specific records (and activities) based on multiple fields, even if those fields are in different entities. When you use Advanced Find, you can specify one or more search conditions. For example, you can find items by account name, city, and the name of the salesperson responsible for the account. You may want to find all the A-level accounts in your city and send them an invitation to a seminar.
Your search can contain Boolean operators, such as AND or OR. While using Advanced Find, you can also enter an asterisk when performing a search (for example, when you're searching for an account, a user, or a contact).
The values you enter aren't case sensitive. For example, if you're entering a state code, Microsoft CRM will find the same records whether you enter CT or ct.
Note
Boolean logic dictates that conditions within parentheses are evaluated before conditions separated by ANDs. ANDs are evaluated before ORs. However, the Advanced Find function doesn't have parentheses and evaluates expressions in the order in which they appear in your search.
To do a search with Advanced Find, follow these steps:
On the main toolbar, click the Advanced Find button.
The window shown in Figure 13-6 appears.
In the Look For drop-down list, select the appropriate choice.
In this example, the Look For list allows you to specify which record type Advanced Find will focus on. After you select the record type (in this example, Accounts), all related fields are available to you. You now proceed to the selection of specific fields, conditions, and values.
In the first row, select a field (in this example, Account Name) from the drop-down list by clicking the down arrow to the right of the field name.
Based on the field you choose, the system selects your available choices for conditions. You can see all the possible conditions by clicking the down arrow to the right of the Condition field.
Choose a condition.
The most commonly used conditions are Equal, Does Not Equal, Contains, Begins With, Contains Data, and Does Not Contain Data. Click the condition you want from the drop-down list. In the example, we chose Greater than.
Enter a value in the Value field.
Microsoft CRM allows you to have multiple values in this field for those fields that have drop-down lists. Relationship Type is an example of such a field. If you separate individual values with a semicolon (;), the system treats that semicolon as if it were an OR condition.
Continue to the next row to add search criteria.
If you run out of rows, click the Select button to begin another row of criteria.
Select two or more rows you want to connect with either AND or OR and then select the Group And or the Group Or button.
To the left of the two selection criteria, a box appears with either an AND or an OR inside. You can change your choice by selecting the down arrow within that box.
Click the Save As button if you'd like to name your query and retain it for future use.
Click the Find button in the lower right corner to actually perform the search.
The Actions button at the top of every account window enables you to assign or share your accounts. You can also delete or deactivate an account.
Warning
Deleting accounts is usually a bad idea because any records attached to an account, such as contacts or opportunities, also go away. After you delete an account, you can never retrieve the information, and you can't undo the action. Deletion is forever. However, if you had previously set up a subaccount, that subaccount remains.
Deactivating an account turns it off, rendering it inactive. You can't edit an inactive account or associate other types of records with it. It disappears from your usual lookups and is visible only if you specifically search for inactive accounts. The advantage of deactivating over deleting is that you can restore a deactivated account to active status should that become necessary. Any sub-accounts that were associated with the original account continue to be active, however.
If you go on an extended vacation, you may want to assign an account to another user. Or perhaps the territories your company covers are being realigned, and many accounts need to be tended to by other managers. If you assign one of your accounts to another user, that new person becomes the account owner, and you are removed from that position.
To assign one or more accounts, follow these steps:
In the upper part of the navigation pane, select Accounts.
The Accounts window appears.
Choose the accounts you want to reassign by clicking (highlighting) each account listing.
You can select multiple accounts by using the Shift key or the Ctrl key. The Shift key selects all the accounts from the first one you selected to the one you're currently positioned on. Hold down the Ctrl key and click to select noncontiguous accounts.
Click the Assign icon (the little guy with the green megaphone).
The Assign Accounts window appears.
Click the radio button next to Assign to Another User.
Click the magnifying glass at the end of the Assign to Another User field.
The Assign Account dialog box opens for choosing the new user.
Select the new user and click OK.
The system returns to the Accounts window. You won't see the reassigned account in the list unless you change the View to Active Accounts.
Sharing is a little different from assigning. Sharing one of your accounts doesn't remove you from ownership; it merely adds additional users to the team servicing that account.
To share one or more accounts, follow these steps:
Go to the Account List View and select all the Accounts you want to share.
You can select multiple Accounts at one time by using the Shift key or the Ctrl key. The Shift key selects all the Accounts from the first one you selected to the one you're currently positioned on. The Ctrl key allows you to randomly select individual Accounts.
On the window's toolbar, choose Actions
Sharing.
The Who Would You Like to Share the Selected Account With window appears.
Choose the users or the team from the Who Would You Like to Share This Account With dialog box.
After you select the users or teams, the system returns you to a List View with check boxes for the security privileges assigned to each user or team. By default, none of these privileges are assigned.
Select the security privileges you want to give to each of the users with whom you're sharing by checking all the appropriate boxes.
For details on which type of security privileges each option allows, check out Chapter 8.
To save these sharing specifications, click OK.