Manage contacts for IT

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hey this is Dan Lehman from automationhelpers.com and today we're going to talk about how we can manage complex relationships between companies and the people who work at them or the contacts now this question came up from a user of smart Suite John who was building a solution around baseball his son plays baseball and he wants to be able to track the different schools for baseball teams the different coaches that coach those teams and the question that came up was how do I track the coach and their relationship to that school but that coach might leave after a given season and I want to know the historic information about that coach were they an assistant coach and we want to be able to track those relationships over time this is a really good question John and I want to make sure I can answer this but for our broader audience I'm going to extrapolate and generalize this a little bit so instead of just talking about baseball and talking about schools and coaches we're going to be talking about the companies that people work at and employees of those companies and we'll talk about how this is typically set up in crms and some tricks about how we can track that more complex information to get started and I promise I won't slide you to death here but I just want to show these relationships so it makes sense on paper and then we'll get into an example inside of smart Suite but we want to link two tables and we're initially starting with a contact table that's our person record that could be a coach in John's case and that contact record is going to store information about that individual their name their email their address their birthday things of that nature and then we have another table which is our company in John's case this is the school but the company we want to track the name maybe we track their business addresses the industry that they're a part of the number of employees so typically we keep these as two separate tables or in smart Suites case we call them apps now from here the most common type of relationship that we see in a CRM or other type of tool is a many-to-one relationship where we say many is n it just represents multiple of these things so many contacts can be associated with a single company and this is the most basic approach and you'll see this very common in lots of different CRM and no code automation platforms let's take a look at how that manifests itself inside of an example so right now I'm inside of a solution called personal CRM this is one that you can just grab the template for inside a smart suite and we see that there is a current company field on the contacts table and this current company is that relationship that linked record to the company's app and I can see that if I modify my settings I can see it links to the company's app and the important part here is that we'll notice that it does not allow us to link to multiple records and that's because it's most common that we just want to track lots of different employees at a single company they're not oftentimes employed by multiple companies at the same time so on the contact side we have multiple contacts to one company if we go over to the company's side this is manifested by this current employees again I can modify the field settings and I can see that yes in this case we allow linking to multiple records on the company's side meaning that we can have those multiple employees be associated with the company now this might be purely sufficient for a large number of people so I'm not saying we have to make it any more complex than this and I want to show you if John was just concerned about seeing if that had changed that the company had changed let's open up Cole's record here and we can see this contact record and we've got the ability to track activity history and we can open this up and see that he in fact switched companies from swing and Cradle to a p Industries now that might be sufficient for you you just want to be able to see did they switch but the thing is if this is storing a lot of activity history it's going to be hard to find all of those changes over time and if this is something that we want to be able to store more information about we need to architect this a little bit differently inside of the system and in this case the relationship we're talking about is n or multiple contacts two n or multiple companies this is actually also included inside of the personal CRM template and I just hid these fields so I'm going to pull open this former companies I'm going to do the same on companies and I'll unhide former employees so this particular template they have the many to one relationship that we talked about but they also want to track former companies and so they allow a many-to-many relationship if we look at this relationship and modify the settings we can see that yes in fact on the contacts we do allow linking to multiple records because a single contact or single employee could have been employed at multiple companies in the past and in fact we see that Cole has been at lots of different companies we can see that historical information now this is somewhat helpful but this still doesn't tell us any information about when was coal at those various companies it doesn't tell us anything about Cole's role or job title at those companies and we can't really store that job title on Cole's record because that's something that changes over time and changes at those former companies this brings us to our ultimate solution of what we want to do to be able to architect so that we can manage these complex relationships and track the information between them and so this last piece that I'm suggesting here is to use what's called an association table now there's lots of different words for this Association entities Junction tables there's lots of ways to refer to it since smart Suite refers to these as apps instead of tables we might call them Association apps and from here you'll get the idea that we've got our contact app and we've got our company app but now we have one more app or table that sits in between the two which is this Association and the reason we have this extra table is so that we can have data that Associates the two things together and most commonly what we're looking at are things like effectivity dates when was this person at this company or what was their role for this person at this company and it allows us the flexibility to be able to associate this information together let's go back into the app here and we're going to create a new app and we're going to call this work experience because really this is the combination between contacts and companies now I don't care about some of these fields like assigned to and priority I'm just going to delete a couple of these out now I just have my primary field here for title let's go ahead and add the fields that we need the first thing that we need is going to be our linked records and this first one we will link to the contacts and in both situations we're only going to allow a single record to be linked let's add this field and while I'm at it let's give it a better name than linked record up here let's go ahead and call this employee because that's what we really want to think of it as and now let's create another linked record and this one we will call company and we'll link to the companies and will only allow a single record to be linked and now we want to add the amount of time that they were there so I might call this something like tenure let's choose a date range that field and I also want to have a role so I can track what their job role was okay I want to change this so that my primary field actually concatenates the information over here so let's go ahead and modify our field I'm going to uncheck these just as we're setting this up we'll say that we want it to Auto generate and in this case we're going to look at this in the context of the employee so I don't really care about the employee's name here instead I'm going to have their role and then we'll put a comma and a space and we want to have their company that they were at and let's add a colon and a space and then finally we will have their tenure when they were at the company let's go ahead and update that field let's start by looking up an employee and we'll have Angela be our employee of choice and let's put one of her past companies so she was previously at Bloom Joy and we can put in these dates we'll say she was there from January of 2016. until June of 2018 and she was the managing director you'll notice that it updates our Title Here let's create another record for Angela so select Angela and we'll say that she was at Rebel brands and here she was there from July of 2018 until January of 2021 and she was the CEO of that company okay so this looks fine let's head back over to our contacts table and open up Angela's record and I should say that we can also add the field here this is currently hidden let's add that link to work experience I don't love the way that it says linked to work experience so let's just change it to work experience we can view this inside of our list view here our grid View but since we have multiple records it probably won't display quite the best so I think it's better just to open up our main record View open up the work section and now we can see her work experience that she was the managing director at Bloom joy and then she was CEO at Rebel brands and this my friends is how we have the ability to use one of those Association apps or Association tables to be able to relate things like companies and the employees and be able to store that additional information this is going to be a concept that you will use time and time again so I encourage you to give this a spin and see if you can get it set up in a way that works for you and the data structure that you're looking for one of the things that we love to do at automation helpers is be able to help companies like yours setting up and implementing smart suite for the first time some of these architectural Concepts take a little while to sink in and this is something that we do every single day so if we can help you out please reach out to us at our website at automationhelpers.com if you have any questions let us know in the comments below