I’m in sales and I have a number of partners that refer me business.
Partners can be anything from companies to individuals. The current group I’m working with is Real Estate Agents.
I have the main brokerage setup as the account.
Under that account, I have the individual agents for that brokerage setup as contacts.
I’d like to be able to associate leads, opportunities and other contacts to the contact - not the account. This way I can keep track of what contact sent me a particular lead. Kind of like ulimately having a contact that is owned by a contact. Does this make sense?
Any ideas? Am I on the right track or do I need to rethink my logoc?
You may need to re-think your logic. A lead is created. They are not yet a contact or account and are simply a record of a possible contact/account/opportunity. When you convert a lead, that is when it becomes a contact and is assigned to an account etc.
Leads are assigned to users, not contacts. You could modify the CRM and add a relationship via Studio to relate leads to contacts, but this may not be correct/desired logic.
We know the problem with accounts also. We are an insurance agency and use sugar quite a few years.
Your thought is quite true. Accounts with us are either employers, insurance companies or competitors. We have accounts disabled in contacts and use the relationship as an employer of contact.
A custum relationship leads to contacts would not help, it would be two subpanels available. The relationship is already there. But very good is a custom relationship contacts to contacts. We organize familiy members, companions, children of the family and recommendation consultants . The differentiation we make with the custom language file.
Apologies can you please clarify? Are you saying that you enter a contact not-affiliated with a company as an account, then use the contacts to denote family members, etc for them?
We are a real estate agency just setting up suitecrm and this is an issue we’re trying to work out currently. The vast majority of our contacts are individuals not associated with a business. BUT, some are.
non-company affiliated contacts – home buyers, sellers and renters
company affiliated contacts - people within management companies (condo associations, etc)
We’ve been working to uncouple contacts from accounts and trying to associate contacts with opportunities in by replacing the ‘accounts’ field with ‘contacts’ but this seems to be a disaster.
But if we were to use accounts for non-company affiliated contacts that may work, but then I believe we lose the ability to search for last names, etc (as accounts would sort only by the first characters of that field, I believe).
Seems you’ve worked this out and would really appreciate how you made this work before I go and blow up a bunch of code!