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we are looking for a flexible way of handling grouping of accounts and contacts. We want a many to many relationsipsthat allows us to create lists such as:
- Customers we are going to invite to 2018 summer party
- Customers we are going to arrange a meeting to demo product X
- Customers we want to get into to talk about X
At the moment all of this is done in Excel - you grab a meeting room and sit with the management team to brainstorm who should be on the list. You pull up last years party list or the list of contacts you went to go and see about product Y. Then the team adds columns to the sheet to track progress; called: yes/no, invite accepted: yes/no; probability of acceptation 0-100% etc
It's flexible, easy to use but this makes a mockery of our current CRM. silo'd data, poor data security, no audit history.
I've been looking at "target lists" and at creating our own new entity called "buckets". The issues with both are the same:
Pro:
- you can associate both accounts and contacts with them (not essential but nice to have)
- search contacts by association with a "target list".
- You can see which target list someone is in from
Cons:
- The select association mechanism is clumsy - the right hand select menu box closes after each contact is selected
- You can't bulk edit in the contact list view - i.e. do another search (e.g. contacts in another list) and then bulk edit a section of them to add them to a new list. I have not been able to add either the custom entity (based on "base plus") or target lists to the may update pannel
- There is no way to do an annotation against the contacts within the context of the list
Am I missing something - isn't this a workflow every B2B has? Does anyone have any better suggestions?
Maybe this should behave more like a tag?
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PS looking for the best way to handle this I stumbled across that you can add "Campaigns" to the mass edit panel for an account but you can't add "list".
- Customers we are going to invite to 2018 summer party
- Customers we are going to arrange a meeting to demo product X
- Customers we want to get into to talk about X
At the moment all of this is done in Excel - you grab a meeting room and sit with the management team to brainstorm who should be on the list. You pull up last years party list or the list of contacts you went to go and see about product Y. Then the team adds columns to the sheet to track progress; called: yes/no, invite accepted: yes/no; probability of acceptation 0-100% etc
It's flexible, easy to use but this makes a mockery of our current CRM. silo'd data, poor data security, no audit history.
I've been looking at "target lists" and at creating our own new entity called "buckets". The issues with both are the same:
Pro:
- you can associate both accounts and contacts with them (not essential but nice to have)
- search contacts by association with a "target list".
- You can see which target list someone is in from
Cons:
- The select association mechanism is clumsy - the right hand select menu box closes after each contact is selected
- You can't bulk edit in the contact list view - i.e. do another search (e.g. contacts in another list) and then bulk edit a section of them to add them to a new list. I have not been able to add either the custom entity (based on "base plus") or target lists to the may update pannel
- There is no way to do an annotation against the contacts within the context of the list
Am I missing something - isn't this a workflow every B2B has? Does anyone have any better suggestions?
Maybe this should behave more like a tag?
===
PS looking for the best way to handle this I stumbled across that you can add "Campaigns" to the mass edit panel for an account but you can't add "list".
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