MidiCRM can help you build a database of contacts and companies shared throughout your team. By maintaining a central database, you can consolidate information from multiple sources in one easily accessible place. That way, meeting notes from the sales team, on-site service activities of the field teams, support tickets from the tech support team can all be linked to the same customer, giving you a 360-degree view of your relationship.
Contacts are real people. They may be individuals who you do business with directly--like individual customers-- or people who work for companies that you do business with--like employees of corporate customers. You can interact directly with contacts, i.e. you can call them, send and receive emails from them, or meet with them.
Companies on the other hand are not individuals, but institutions like businesses, schools, or government agencies. You can do business with them, but you interact with them through your contacts there.
This distinction is important: While you have your interactions with contacts, your relationship can be with the company they work for. Sometimes a contact can leave a company and another contact can take over those interactions. Sometimes you may have to deal with multiple contacts in the same company. Making a distinction between contacts and companies helps you manage the relationship through these changes.
There are multiple ways to create contacts and companies in MidiCRM.
Manually adding new records: You can click the contacts and companies tabs from the top menu bar, then click new company or new contact buttons to create new records.
While creating or editing another record: In MidiCRM, you can link any note, activity, contact or company to other records. But what if the record you want to link to does not exist yet? For example, this can happen when you are writing a note about someone you just met for the first time.
After you enter a summary of your meeting, you will want to link that note to the contact and company records of the person you talked with by typing their names in the relations box under the note. Since you have no previous relationship with this company or contact, MidiCRM will not be able to match these names with existing records, but offer to create new records. Selecting these options will open popup windows where you can add these records to your database and continue where you left off. To see how this works, check out the video in the tutorial page about writing notes.
Importing contacts and companies: If you have your existing contacts in a spreadsheet, you can import it to create new contacts and their companies in a single step. Make sure different people from the same company have exactly the same company name in the company column, so that MidiCRM does not create multiple companies for each of them.
This operation may require system administrator privileges. To start an import operation, go to the contacts or companies tab, click the Actions button and select Import. This page also has a link to a sample file that you can use to prepare the import data.
Contact and company pages have dedicated notes tabs. By clicking these, you can quickly access every note written by any member of your team about that contact or company in chronological order. This is a great way to review your relationship with them.