Adding Individual and Bulk Contact Records to the CRM
In this video we discuss several methods for adding individual and bulk contacts to the CRM. Let’s start with the quick and dirty method. This can be done by adding the Email, First Name, Last Name and Phone number of a contact through this simple widget on the dashboard.
To add, simply fill out the form. Here we use John Smith. If we move into our contacts module, you will notice he has been added as a contact. John Smith is recorded as a duplicate. We will do a quick merge record with John Smith. You have several options when you have a duplicate record. You can:
- Keep the record
- Mark it as duplicate
- Delete it
- Keep and hide the others
- Keep and delete the others
- Merge records
It will be best for us to merge the record. When we merge the record, you can chose between the differing fields in the record.
The most common way to create a new individual contact is by clicking on the “Create a Contact” on the Left Sidebar Action Menu. Once clicked, you will see all the available fields available for contacts. Each of these fields can be completely customized. We can work with you to add individual fields and tables that match your given systems and processes.
The fields we have as default are specifically built for M&A and capital raise transactions. You can add a Company or Deal relationship to this contact record by clicking on the green + symbol next to “Company” or “Deals.”
Fill out as many of the other items you can when filling out your contact record. This ensures you can search, filter and extract the data at a later date.
Bulk Record Importing
Adding individual contacts can be tedious. That is why Bulk Importing is helpful. You are free to import thousands of records in a single import. Setting up your import is fairly straight-forward.
The first step in importing your contacts in bulk is to create a custom Tab Delimited .CSV file. Using excel, create headers that will match the fields of the investment banking CRM. For instance, First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, Industry Interest, etc. First Name and Last Name are the two required fields to create a new record. If you wish to add a Company to the record and tie it directly to the contact, be sure to include the Company as one of the columns in the spreadsheet.
Once you have your .CSV ready to import, go back to the “Import Contacts” menu link in the Contacts module dashboard. Choose your .CSV from your local file. Once you import it, the system will attempt to appropriately map the appropriate fields in the .CSV to those that already exist in the CRM. If they do not exist, you may choose to create new fields. If the automatically-matched fields are incorrect, you can simply choose another field from the Contacts Module to map to the appropriate field in the CSV.
There are several options below the field choice section which include the following:
Create records for link fields—If you have linked fields (in this case you do with Company), then having this selected adds a relationship between the Company and the Contact, which is usually what you want and why this is selected by default.
Update existing records—Use this option with caution as records with similar names can unwillingly be updated. You may want to import records previously-imported. In this case, the “updating existing record” function can be helpful.
Tags—Add unique tags for future filtration, search and identification of your contacts.
Automatically fill certain fields—Override an existing field or automatically fill empty fields with the content of your choice.
Automatically log a comment—A bulk comment might give indications to a given user with more specific descriptive items for this particular import. It will show up in the Comments section on all the individual Contacts in this import.
Assign records for lead routing—You can automatically assign a given contact to any member of your team that has a separate account in the system.
Skip posting new records to the Activity Feed—This is exactly as it sounds. I personally do not like to busy the Activity Feed with contacts imports and usually choose this option.
Batch size—This indicates how many records the system will import in a batch. The lower, the slower, but smaller batch size helps to avoid import errors. Keeping it at the default of 25 is usually sufficient.
Once you process the import, you will notice all your records are now included in the system, the tags have been added and that each contact has been tied with the relationship with its given company.
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