Freelancer confused ..... help

[Thomas-English]

I am a cameraman and as such do not know much about CRM s. I am looking for a web based CRM software to manage my clients and leads.
I do maybe three different jobs a week. All with often completely different clients and often completely new crew. On these jobs there are 4 categories of people that might recommend me for future work with other new companies they don’t necessary work for: Directors, Assistant Directors, Grips and Camera Assistants.
The funny thing is that the production company that I invoice is in no way my client. It is the freelancers that just happen to be on that one off job that get me on board.
I want to document each job I do (callsheet) and these possible lead people. I want to set reminders as to when I should email each of these leads and I want to query my database for people that I have neither emailed, campaigned or done a job with in say 9 months
I also have two different products. I Operate Steadicam and I work as a Lighting cameraman. I do not wish to cross sell (at the moment) my work between these different market segments for many important reasons. So I want to be able to keep the Grips that know me as a Lighting cameraman separate to the grips that know me as a Steadicam Operator. Clearly some key people will end up knowing me as both.
What CRM software do you recommend? Should I record each callsheet (job actually done) as a lead, an opportunity or as a sale? How should I categorize these market segments.
I spend a lot of time finding interesting people on the net and sending them a nice email. Should these be placed as “leads”
I apologise about the simplicity of my understanding here. I have no formal education here and have been picking up as much of your science as I can.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thomas English
www.thomasenglish.co.uk

[arnaud_carrenet]

Hello Thomas,

you do a very interesting job and I appreciate your website !
I would suggest the following points :

• You can use SugarCRM CE unless you would need to do reports and automatic workflow.
• Unless you have some hosting technical knowledge you should choose to make it hosted by SugarCRM itself.

After it is quite simply and the way you talk shows that you have already understand CRM concepts :

• Account is a company
• Contact is a person working for a company, can also be Freelancer
• Lead is a contact and a company (in the same form) that can be converted to a Contact or a Company.
• In each module : company, contact and lead you should create (from the studio) a multi-select dropdown list : Steadicam / Lightning cameraman, so that you can select one or both values if a lead knows both of your activities.
• You can create phone calls alerts so that they will appear in your agenda when 9 months later it is time to call them.
• You can use fields dropdown lists to categorize companies, contacts and leads so that you'll be able to find easily all Directors...

Hope my thoughts will be useful for you.

[Thomas-English]

Merci Arnaud,

You answer immediately helps clarify things in my mind.

I was thinking. Since nobody has any affiliation to the company we are all working for in Film/TV. Maybe I will put peoples subtypes as the Account.

Essentially have and Account: Directors another one Producers and another one Grips ? So it would be a little bit like all the grips are working for one company / Account. Or am I making things a little too complicated?

How should I record a job/sale (I get a callsheet every job with everyones names and email addresses on)? Should I make a new product for every job I do and sell it to each individual on the callsheet? That way recording every job I have done with everyone?

I assume I can query a SugarCRM to see when/Who I have not made a sale to in a long time? (Which directors or producers have forgotten about me)

[arnaud_carrenet]

Hello Thomas,

1 / " I will put peoples subtypes as the Account" : it's a good idea
2 / You should keep things easy, from my point of view, stay with Accounts and contacts + add title to your contacts : Directors,...
3 / For me a job should be a won opportunity where you have amount and closed date (when you won the job) and date of realization (new field) when you did the job, could also be a meeting.
4 / "I assume I can query a SugarCRM to see when/Who I have not made a sale to in a long time? (Which directors or producers have forgotten about me)" : this kind of query is always difficult with crm tools unless you linked it to a report tool : querying an empty value (I didn't work with this Director) is difficult.
Remember that if you use Community version, you will not be able to make any query until you use the Pro version and even with the Pro version, you will not be able to make that sort of query, but maybe some external advise would be a good thing ? Anyone has an idea ?

[scariou29]

Hi Arnaud

Using the project SynoReport freely available on SugarForge it is possible to create
queries based on the data included in the SugarCRM application.
Of course the prerequisite is to know the SQL language and data model SugarCRM.
But if Thomas did not deviate from standard SugarCRM i imagine that the community will know him
how to generate the SQL query that goes.