So, I’ve had a look at the online demo and all seems cool, but it doesn’t quite do what I want it to. I work in the construction industry and in my industry opportunities are one to many not one to one. Is this possible?
I also note that contacts don’t seem to be automatically added as employees of an account even though the contact has the account as their company. Is this a bug?
I also noted that there doesn’t seem to be a history of a contact’s accounts. In our industry people move around a lot. We need to be able to see a history of where someone has worked and the opportunities they were linked to. Is this possible?
Finally, the accounts that leads are attached to don’t link to the accounts data in the system. Can this be added?
The opportunities here are meant to be chased/follow up and finally consider then as closed won or closed lost. And for that reason it is an opportunity to get business from that assigned Account. We need to understand the nature of your requirement here, what is the case where you would like to have an opportunity with multiple business? may be their can fit a different module from CRM for your needs Or we can always create a new module and customize the process what you are looking for.
I am not sure if i get you correctly here. But if you are saying that on the contacts you see the Account assigned. But on Accounts you do not see that contact in the subpanel? If so, Can you please make sure you are checking the correct subpabel ‘Contacts’ and not ‘Contracts’?
I also noted that there doesn’t seem to be a history of a contact’s accounts. In our industry people move around a lot. We need to be able to see a history of where someone has worked and the opportunities they were linked to. Is this possible?
In Contacts module Opportunities subpanel, you can see the Create/Select button, that allows you to select and associate Opp with Contacts/Accounts etc.
Employees are “Users” so if you want to associate every contact with Employee, this would need some customisation to create similar record in Employees module.
Contacts Job History, you can add as a Custom Module.
Leads → Don’t know what you are referring to, can you attach a screenshot or elaborate a bit more.
One Account (which is an organisation, that could be a client, or not yet) - can have as many Opportunities as you wish.
contacts don’t seem to be automatically added as employees of an account even though the contact has the account as their company. Is this a bug?
The word ‘employee’ means ONLY people at YOUR company. Not people at Accounts.
People at Accounts are Contacts. (NB they are not Leads)
I also noted that there doesn’t seem to be a history of a contact’s accounts. In our industry people move around a lot. We need to be able to see a history of where someone has worked and the opportunities they were linked to.
Every ‘Activity’ (Call, meeting, Note) -can be ‘related to’ an Opportunity.
So when a Contact moves to a new Account (easy to change their ‘account’ in a Contact - when you do that it automatically changes their 'office phone; and address to the new company. But leaves you to manually change emails; and phone extensions (also known as DDIs)
Opportunities at the old Account - will still have historic Calls/Meetings against that Contacts’ name - nothing lost.
Finally, the accounts that leads are attached to don’t link to the accounts data in the system.
Leads: are not like Contacts -they have NO link to an Account.
In your case - maybe you are using Leads when Contacts would be better.
If you have a new contacts list, but don’t yet know their Account /company: one workround is to have some ‘Bucket’ account names used specially for them eg
‘contacts needing Account Info’
Then it is easy for an admin person to search for contacts at that account name, and work through them 1 by 1: allocating to Accounts, and/or creating new accounts as needed.
Some nice and thorough answers here, let me just add a couple of details -
About the “historic” data, SuiteCRM has a tool just for that, the “View Change Log” in every record’s detail view. And you can customize the fields that you want it to track, in Studio, [moduleName], Fields, [fieldName], Audit.
With that maybe you can record the several successive values of the linked Account. But you will still have to search opportunities from their own module to get complex listings of what this person worked on in the past.
The Leads / Account relationship is not totally absent, it’s just slightly mysterious and there’s a reason for it: often you want to have a Lead without a matching account, or with an account for which you don’t have a record in the CRM yet. This is because leads are meant to be fast ways of tracking people coming into contact with you, but you might not have all the information you need to fully “situate” them in the CRM. When you have, you should really be working with Contacts (you can then segment contacts based on some field if you still need to distinguish sub-groups).
So, basically, the Leads record keeps an Account name, but saves it as a simple string, not an actual relationship to an Account record. When converting a Lead, some logic will run trying to match that name to an existing account. If it matches one (and only one), it will generate a proper relationship link between the new Contact and the Account.
Thanks for your response. For opportunities and needing one to many here is an example:
Building A which is owned by Account A is going to be redeveloped. In a one to one scenario Building A would be an opportunity. However, in our industry Building A represents many opportunities. We will bid to Builder A, Builder B and Builder C who in turn are bidding to Account A for the work. This is 1 opportunity for us, but we need to track our bids to all the Builders - only one of whom will win the work with Account A. Having three separate opportunities for this scenario would skew win ratios.
In construction opportunities are buildings/addresses, not accounts. You can think of the opportunity as a project. Many accounts and leads may be attached to the project i.e the architect (who we may bid to for work on the project), the end client, for example a tenant (who we may bid to), builders/contractors (who we may bid to). And we may bid different phases of the project as well. I hope this isn’t too confusing!
one solution to that (other people may have better ones):
Account A is the Account in SuiteCRM
One Opp at it -for ‘Building A’
Then all proposals go into that one Opp - for ALL Builders A to C.
The staff at Builders A to C are Contacts at seperate Accounts ‘Builder A’… 'to ‘Builder C’: so they will have their correct postal address, office -main-phone etc.
The above works because an Opp can contain Calls/Meets/Notes etc from ANY contact in Suite. Ie it does not limit it to Contacts at the same Account as the Opp itself.
The downside - with all Builders activity in the one Opp: it will be rather ‘mixed up’ containing them all.
Another way:
Have 1 Opp for the project overall -at Account 1
For Building A project - Do have a seperate Opp at each Builder - so multiple Opps.
in the DropDowns for Opp Type - add one which is for these - eg something that you know means : ‘Just-1-Builder-but-many-builder-Project’.
When you win the Project - 2 Opps are marked WON: the one at Account 1: and the applicable Builder_X one
Then the problem you mention remains - too many Opps will be un-won; bring your success rate down:
so create a Report for success - that excludes those Opp Types.
The advice given above is very good, there are many ways to build and / or report these relationships, SuiteCRM is heavily customisable.
I doubt any off the shelf package will be completely compliant for any large organisation as they all have internal standards.
The “Standards” related to “opportunites” and other terminology are regional labels not necessarily global / universal. The power of SuiteCRM is that users can customise it to their requirements, through collaboration with developers and providers in this community and others.
Reading the opening post one trap would be that re-purposing existing labels might cause issues with various developers, you would need to have a consistent long term relationship with whoever does the customisation.
SuiteCRM has many ways to customise those labels, and build the required relationships, so it’s important to understand the relationships and methods that are in place or possible, and not become too caught up in the terminology, because often terminology is localised and subjective.
As pointed out successfully reporting relationships can be achieved many ways, there might not be any one right way to do this, it’s a bit subjective. Is the relationship built into the data, or is it dervied during reporting, it can really be an end user decision provided the data is captured correctly. Someone who is experienced in the backend might build new tables, either at the time of data collection or at the time it is viewed, on the other hand an experienced report writer might chose to build this at the time of reporting.
Does a data structure have to reflect / match a perspective / view, that’s a very big philosphical debate?
I have this exact scenario with a client. They sell services to landlords. Many landlords. They also have subcontractors. The center of everything is creating a “Building” module. The building ties together the Account=the leasing company, the contacts= building managers, etc. And Opportunities can be tied both to an account and a building. Subcontractors can also be related to a building and/or opportunity. So in your scenario, one Building could have multiple opportunities. But if you’re looking at win ratios you could do it by building instead of opportunity.