Sorting Accounts Question..

[masmith]

Hi.

I'm contemplating having a large number of records in my Accounts DB/Tbl (~50K). However, I'd like to be able to narrow down the number of actual accounts to be a subset that my individual users would actually see. Is there a way to perform some sort of select/sort on the actual data, so that the individual/given user is only shown a subset of the total number of Account records

I'm really searching for some way of doing:
select all records where custom_field_1 < 10,000 and custom_field_1 > 500, and allowing this subset to be the recordlist that the user is able to select from....

I've been looking all over the 'net, as well as the wiki trying to solve this.

Thoughts/comments/pointers to this would be greatly appreciated!

I'm running on fedora/mysql, using v5 of SugarCRM...

Thanks

-mark
caliventures@yahoo.com

[eggsurplus]

My question is should these be Accounts then? Are these current customers? If not, perhaps Leads or Prospects would be a more appropriate place. Regardless, if you're trying to show the top accounts/leads to work with one option is to have a custom weight field which you could set depending on your different factors like the ones you've listed above.

[masmith]

HI Eggsurplus!

Thanks for the reply to my question about the sorting aspect.

IAs you can tell, new to sugarcrm. However, I've been looking into to aspects of leads/accounts. I can see how I could simply dump everything I have into the leadsTBL for sugarcrm, and then move the desired "leads" into the accounts..

Or, perhaps a better approach would be to dump everything I have into the opportunities TBL, and then populate the leads with the potential companies, and finally move the ones that we're going to deal with into the accounts TBL..

You mentioned the "prospects" TBl, I couldn't find anything regarding prospects, and didn't see any "prospect" related tab on the menu list. Can you provide additional information on this?

Basically, I'm going to start out with a large list of potential companies, I'm then filtering these based on the criteris of viewers to their website. and generated revenue, from here, i'll actually be talking to 400-500 companies, that I'll finally have in my AccountsTBL..

Any thoughts/comments/ideas you have on this I'd be interested in discussing...Also, I'm assuming that it's a pretty easy process in sugarcrm, to run some kind of filtering mechanism over a tbl, to move/promte data to another tbl.. or would this be via an external php/perl app...

Thanks

-mark
caliventures@yahoo.com

[eggsurplus]

Mark,

There are some good podcasts about the differences between leads, accounts, opps at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/co...s/podcasts.php. There are also some free Sugar University offerings as well. You'll probably want to load these all in as Leads and as you generate interest there's a Convert Lead button which will let you convert the lead into an Opportunity along with an Account and/or Contact. This is definitely the recommended approach and will make it easier to differentiate your prospects (which is really Leads, sorry for the confusion) from your current customers.

Hope that helps!

[masmith]

Hi Again Eggsurplus!

Ok. I'll check the podcasts.

I've been looking at the SugarCRN db/tbls, and I see the leads/prospects/accounts tbls...

So just what is a laed, vs. prospect??!!! I don't see a prospect TAB, so I have no idea how to even get data into the prospect tbl!

Right now, I have an external list of companies (~50K) I want this to comprise my initial list that populates some initial TBL within sugarcrm. Would this be either the lead/prospectTBL?

Once I populate this initial tbl, I'd then like to be able to see/view the data of course, so, based upon which tbl it's inserted, I'd use the appropriate tab within the top menu of sugarcrm.

At this point, I'd like to be able to have some kind of filtering/select process, which when run across this initial tbl, will import/promote the reduced dataset to either the lead/opportunity tbl...

and from here, after I contact the "lead/opportunity", it gets promoted,copied to the Account TBL...

Does this even make sense????

Thanks

-mark
caliventures@yahoo.com

ps, are you ever on IRC/IM.. are you up for a quick conversation on this!!

thanks again!!

[eggsurplus]

Sorry for the confusion. I call prospects leads so it would be the Lead table. There's also a Target List but it doesn't sound appropriate for what you're doing. What you want to do sounds very doable. We're doing that with our leads right now. We have about 8 different criteria that makes up a match weight using a custom formula. This has to be initially set through the db but after that you can have an after_save hook update the weight for a record after each save. We then have the weight on the ListView so that our sales folks can sort by that and work with the best leads first. Does that make sense?

[masmith]

umm no!!

sorry. but while I'm sure it's pretty simple, prior to a few days ago, I hadn't installed/started to climb into SugarCRM!

so, to keep it simple for me. where would the initial external data I have go into sugarCRM (what TBL) and would i use an external app (perl/php) to do the mass insert. Also, given that I have fields that aren't part of the default/list of fields for the lead/account tbl I can add customized fields. I'm assuming that my external app will need to import into both the lead/accountTBL, as well as the associated cutom_fieldTBL...

Also, there is a prospect TBL.. if you are only referring to the lead/accountTBLs.. what's the prospect TBL used for??

I'm pretty sure that once I get the defs/language down, then I can figure out how to move the data between the various tbls...

thanks

-mark
caliventures@yahoo.com

[stevec]

Hi,

The prospects table (if I recall correctly) holds the individual records of targets that are used to build target lists. For some reason, they are referred to as prospects in the actual tables, but the default term for them in the app is target). Target lists are those lists used to construct campaigns (usual mass email campaigns). These target lists contain different types of members - full contacts (prospect_list->contact relationship), leads (prospect_list->lead relationship) and targets (prospect_list->prospect relationship).

So think of targets as leads for leads. They're the sort of leads you pick up from attendee lists to events etc. Not even qualified enough to be a lead.

Hope that helps.

[stevec]

Just to add a bit more. If the data is simple enough, the sugar import tools are good enough. That'll set up the correct tables, relationships etc. If your data is more complex, then you might want to import directly into the tables. This is not a simple process though as you'll need to ensure user_ids, interrelationships etc are maintained. Also, things like timezones are handled properly if you are working across regions. We did this to import from Goldmine and it was a very involved process. You do end up learning how it all ties in together though.

There are also other tools to help import - a few are open source. Have a look at Jitterbit and Talend:

http://www.sugarexchange.com/softwar...p?form_cat=356