CRM Contact Creation, Import/Export & Management
In this video we will go over exactly what contacts are, how to create a contact within the investment banker CRM and how to mass import contacts. Contacts are the heart of CRM. You may search through contacts based on certain criteria, organize contacts in lists and even view their locations across the world with e-maps. The first step in creating a contact in the CRM is to head up to the top left of the screen and click on contacts, this will bring us to the contacts module where you will see all of our contacts. On the left-hand “actions” menu, you will see the option to “Create a Contact.” You will be taken to the create contact view. Three fields are required to create a contact: the first name, the last name and the visibility. If I were to fill in the first name, but not the last name, you’ll see that delivers an error message, last name cannot be blank. We’ll just go back and pretend that didn’t happen. Let’s go ahead and fill out this form and down below, under the visibility, you see it’s automatically been set to public, you can change this however to either private or to user’s groups. When set to private and make it so that the contact is only viewable by the creator, or whoever you choose to assign the record to–which could include a contact group. If it’s set to user’s groups that means that everyone in the creator’s groups can see this contact but no one outside of it, so if I were to be in say, the Managing Director’s group, then all the Managing Directors could see this contact but no one in let’s say the Associates group could see the contact. I’m going to leave this set to public, and since we have filled out all the required fields, we can actually create this contact now, but keep in mind this is a very sparsely populated form. The more the information you put into this form, the more valuable the contact becomes, so make sure you meticulously take down information when filling out the contact record. Let’s go ahead and click create. After that loads, presto, we’ve created a contact, but if you’ve made a mistake when creating the contact, or need to change the details, you may edit the record by going over to the left, under actions and click on edit contact. If you’d like to delete the contact, that’s another option, just click the delete contact link, it will prompt you before the deletion in case you’ve hit it by mistake. It’s worth it to note that when you create or delete contacts, a new entry on your activity feed will be populated, so make sure you plan accordingly.
Next, we will be learning how to mass-import contacts into the contacts module. Keep in mind that the same mass import function and methodology is available for other modules, including Companies and Projects or Deals. To import en-masse via a comma-delimited CSV, simply visit the Contacts module available through a link on the “Actions Menu”. On the left hand menu click “Import Contacts.” When importing contacts, your CSV does not have to be precise. You can create “.csv” files in Google sheets or Microsoft Excel, etc. You will only need to make sure your file has properly delineated headers. Headers will help you map your columns and import your fields appropriately. The system may properly map some of the headers against the right fields within contacts. But, you may want to double check the mapping of fields between your “.csv” file and CRM database right here. You may also review your options for processing import data here. You may wish to add tags or otherwise differentiate this particular import. This can be helpful if you would like to import Contacts that will be used for outreach for a specific Deal as the tags become searchable. When adding tags during an import, be sure to separate multiple tags by commas, but do not include spaces between the tags.
We then need to go ahead and hit process import which will begin the import, and then we have the import is complete. We’ll see that when we go the Contacts module, our newly imported Contacts will show up. If you’d wanted to export these contacts, all you’d have to do is click on export Contact under the action menu, and click export, and it will automatically export all the selected Contacts from your database.
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