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welcome everyone this is michael from the marks group live happy to be working with you today on the contacts module after this video is over please there we go after this video is over please feel free to email us at support marks marksgrouplive.com for any questions on this topic or on anything else soho also be sure to rate this class as well helping out our fellow zoho users and helping us to improve our video library in this lesson we're going to take our first dive into the contacts module we'll start by putting the contacts module into the larger perspective of the zoho crm environment then we'll look into how to find the contacts module we'll create a new contact in two different ways first by converting a lead and then by using one of the add new methods we'll take a quick look at some of the most important fields in a contact and finally we'll look into some of the things that we're likely to do with the contact before however we get into our zoho screens one word of advice if your screen doesn't look exactly like mine don't panic your zoho instance might be set up to a little bit differently from mine and there may be a few situations or differences in some of the screens most of what i demonstrate today should work across all versions of zoho with minimal differences if you try to replicate what i'm doing and you get stuck drop us an email again at supportmarksgrouplive.com and we'll see about helping you out let's get started with a review of the context for contacts in zoho in most business situations we have a crm that has a bunch of leads in it these are people who with whom we've spoken at trade shows people that have signed up for a webinar people that we've spoken to at conferences however we find these are people that we think we might want to do business with some time then through the magic of things happening and conversations our lead says hey let's do some business and they express an interest in purchasing a product or a service from us when we do that our zoho crm converts that lead and that organization into a contact and an account so a lead is somebody that we might want to do business with a contact is somebody who has entered the deal zone where we are actively trying to sell something to that person or we have sold something to that person when we convert a lead and an organization into a into a contact an account the lead becomes the contact and the organization gets turned in into an account so now that we have some context let's go find that contacts module and in most of those installations we will find the contacts in the zoho control bar up near the top left of your screen in my situation here you'll see it's immediately to the right of the leads module so home leads contacts accounts that's a fairly common uh arrangement of modules in zoho if by chance it's not there and it's not elsewhere on that top um that top row of the most commonly used modules you may have to go to the ellipsis the ellipsis that says there's more here and search for it there by the way if you're a bit unsteady in the zoho interface we have two great introductory lessons on how to get around in zoho and zoho interface basics look for those in the video library at marksgrouplive.com so in this situation where i'm searching modules i might search for contacts and it won't actually find it because the contacts module is already up here in the zoho control bar so let me get out of there let's see let's go to the contacts module right now that we're in the context module how to create one there are two ways that we can do this the most obvious way is to click on the plus sign at the in the zoho control bar and contact is the second item down there all right after lead if we're in and in fact you can start this from any screen any screen in zoho so even if i'm for example in the lead screen i can create a new contact by clicking on the plus sign in the zoho control bar and clicking on contact if i'm in the contacts module i can do that as well or i can click on the plus sign that it's me that's immediately beside the import button however neither of these methods is necessarily the most common remember that usually we start with a lead and we convert that lead into a contact when we start to pitch a deal and actively engage that person in the sales process so usually we will create a new contact by converting a lead let's go ahead and do that now i'm in my leads module now and i'm going to convert one of my leads into a contact let's go for max minson i've clicked on max minson's lead information and i'm let's say that dr minson has expressed interest in one of our products or one of our services and one of the things that i'll note is that there's all this information that we've entered on dr minson the name the lead status the annual revenue for dr minson's company and there's a note charming gentleman he used to buy his mother flowers i make note of that because we're going to see what information comes along when we convert dr minson from a lead into a contact and i'm going to do that by clicking on the convert button so when i'm in a lead i can click on the convert button zoho offers me a number of options here it tells me it will create a new count for dr minson's company which in this case is mfef incorporated it will create a new contact that is max minson and zoho gives me the option to create a new deal i will cr um i won't get into the details of creating a new deal at this time uh we do of course have a class on setting up and working deals which in some ways is is the icing on the cake that's the goal that's the end game here now when i do convert a lead it is helpful for me to set an owner of that con of that contact this is important because in many organizations your lead capture team is different from your business development team that is to say you'll have people who go out to conferences who work on organizational outreach activities where they're gathering information on people who might want to do business with us and when those people enter the deal-making process it might be handed off that information might be handed off to a different team so i click on the person there and right now our zoho instance here only has two users in it i will leave it as tmg live admin and in fact that was the owner that that was the default owner for the new record in fact when you're importing a large number of contacts so for example you've been working a trade show and you've got the lead generator or you've you're collecting name cards or you're scanning badges it is possible for you to import that list into zoho and to set up automatic assignment rules that govern who owns any incoming contacts on contacts this is very powerful stuff and yes we have a class on that too so let's convert dr max minson there's the process zoho tells me it has converted it successfully and it says that here's the account that's the organization that dr max vinson belongs to and it's create a new contact for max now when i go back to my leads module i shouldn't see dr max minson there anymore and i don't think he is i'm sorting by lead name it's doing the surname here and it's definitely not there let's see if dr max smithson is in my accounts and there he is right there so now that dr minson is in my account is my contacts what am i going to do with them first thing i'm going to do i'm going to click on the name this looks similar to the leads module but this is in fact the contacts module and sometimes it's helpful just to glance up and remember what context you're in by looking at the top bar and seeing where the shading is here it's on contacts now first and foremost when i'm in this screen i can add information any of these blank fields that we can fill in is probably a good idea to fill in i know that we don't always have time to research every aspect of every person in our leads lists but once they become contacts it's increasingly important to have as much information as we plausibly can this information can be helpful in understanding who our contact's contact is within the context of his or her organization and can give us helpful information when interacting with that contact to modify any field we can hover over it with a mouse and if we see a pencil icon we can click in that field and add information so in this case i'm going to say director of advanced biological research click on the plus sign i've edited that information i can also edit more than one field at a time by clicking on the edit button and now i can click into any of those fields let's see um let's take a look and make sure as we scroll down through this mfef that's dr minson's email address all this information except for that was entered in the lead screen let's see there's a description there are my notes oh there's my note a charming gentleman he used to buy his mother flowers there is the note so he entered this information in the leads screen and when zoho created the contact out of the lead so pulled all of the information over into the contact now when we talk about working a contact apart from editing the information we're most often talking about engaging with that contact in a meaningful manner that means we can set up tasks let's scroll down here there we go open activities we can create tasks such as sending information to our contact we can set up events where we might meet with our contact or calls in which case uh in which you know we call our contact i'm sure you've heard that it takes seven interactions with a client before they're ready to make a purchase decision and these tasks often comprise many of those interactions as we scroll down through the contact information closed activities are simply open activities that we have completed uh we can add information about deals that that contact is involved with we can send information about products we can send quotes we can record sales orders purchase orders uh if we have integrated zoho with our email accounts we have a class for that of course uh we can also see a record of our correspondence with this contact one of the neat areas that we look at again another in another lesson is the campaigns module we can tell zoho about our marketing campaigns and then connect our contact with those campaigns so that we can evaluate the financial roi for any given campaign very powerful stuff in terms of tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and finally we have our social connector which allows us to integrate zoho with our twitter and facebook accounts and see instantly what this particular contact is doing on those platforms because this is our training zoho training platform we are not actually connecting with real people so that's why this area is blank for dr max minson who is also a fictional person as with just about everything else that you've seen in this lesson we do have a specific lesson on the social connector now the one thing you are unlikely to do with a contact is delete it however if you found that you've really lost things up and you need to get rid of a contact who is never actually a person um or somebody uh i'm not even sure if you do it for a dead end but if for some reason you need to delete a contact you can do so by clicking on the ellipsis in the top right corner and clicking on delete zoho asks if you're really sure that you want to do this and that's a good thing because if you're really sure you want to do this it's all right to do it but on the other hand if you have any organizational history with dr max minson you probably do not want to get rid of any of your contacts when you delete the the contact record you're deleting all records that are related to that person so you will not have any record of a history of deal having dealt with dr max minson if you have too many contacts and you don't want to keep seeing old contacts there are ways to filter them out of your usual views check out our class on views for more information on that subject all right that brings us back to where we started i think so let's recap what we've gone over today today we looked at placing contacts within the context of the zoho environment specifically within the context of leads and accounts how a lead becomes contact and an account that are usually involved in a deal we've looked into how to find the contacts module whether it's up in the zoho control bar or whether it's under the ellipsis that says there's more here we looked at two different methods for creating a new contact and certainly the better one of these is just or the more common one of these is to start with a lead and to convert a lead we looked at some of the fields in a contact the fact that we can modify a field after the fact so once we've got a contact in there we can still go in and modify the fields we look at some of the most important fields notably the activities fields so the tasks the event and the calls and we looked at some of the things that how some of the ways that we can work a contact so i hope you've enjoyed this video check out our library for other training videos like this one if you have any suggestions for other classes or if you have questions that you may have about zoho please email us at support marksgrouplive.com thanks for viewing you