How to classified "Contacts" in the broadest sense

[dgilroybs8]

Hi All,

We're new to Sugar. We're in the process of moving 10.000 contacts from Goldmine to SugarCRM CE.

One things I'm as yet undecided on is how to reclassify all our different types of "contacts" into the new Sugar. We have all different kinds of contacts e.g. Prospects, Clients, Suppliers, Partners etc.

So, how does everyone else do it? Do you save Accounts for clients only? But then were do you put Suppliers as they are not Leads and not really Accounts (if Accounts are used for clients).

Does anyone create a custom module based off Contacts or something to record these non-Lead/non-Account/Contact contacts.

Anyone got any advice or opinions?

Regs....David.

[eggsurplus]

What we do is put prospects into leads so that it can follow our sales process from leads to opportunities to accounts. Clients, suppliers, and partners are all accounts with the account type field set appropriately for each with contact records being created and related to the account. We have a b2b model, however. There are good recommendations on this forum for setting up Sugar for contact based businesses. A search for "site:sugarcrm.com/forums b2c" should help out.

[sugarcane]

Hello David,

you could use the leads module for prospects like eggsurplus suggested. You also have the option to create a type dropdown field in the Accounts module and be able to differentiate between Customer, Supplier, Partner etc. It really just depends on your business case.

[hubcrm]

Hi David - been down this route before for a client and it needs to be a relatively ruthless process of reclassification. I remember it being quite an involved migration. Goldmine is pretty flat where SugarCRM delivers a cycle. Here's how I classify accounts, contacts, leads etc in Sugar. I'll deal with the Sugar terminology and you should be able to map your terms to that.

Prospects/Targets - Effectively an import bucket or bought list. Think of it as the email list you might buy or anything really old that you haven't done business with in some time. So records you're hanging on to through nostalgia you stick in here with no history and just run a campaign against them. I say prospect/target because it's a bit of an inconsistency in naming in Sugar. The DB calls it prospect but Sugar calls the target. Prospect is generally something much further down the track in UK sales terms.
You can't have history against a target....

Leads - They have shown an interest in your business but you cannot yet quantify whether there is an opportunity to attach to it. There's money in them there hills but we dont know how much....You can maintain a history of contact etc with leads. If you need to track history on an old contact then it goes here

Account + Contact + Opportunity - Anything you have an open sales opportunity in Goldmine should hit Sugar like this

Account + Contact - Clients, Partners, Suppliers, Competitors etc etc. Account is just a generic placeholder rather than necessarily an active client. I think in Salesforce they call it an organisation. I think organisation is a better term however it's never prompted me to go renaming tabs. I generally think it better to accept Sugar convention on naming where possible because relabelling is just mind numbing.

You inevitably get to a point where you lose some opportunities and end up with accounts you need to classify in some way. You'll likely already have a process for that, but the point is that it will likely span boh accounts and leads. If you in the game of constantly recycling old contacts then you've got some think to do around this. Hope the above helps a bit. PM me if you need any migration help, we done this before from goldmine. If it's an old version of goldmine then you've got quite a big change to manage in terms of interface and use. The bigger the sales team the harder that is but I believe Sugar is a much better architected solution.

Cheers

Vince