In any CRM, Accounts and Contacts are the first basic building blocks. Accounts could be businesses, organizations or groups. Contacts are people, individuals that work in a specific organization or business. In case of an educational institution, contacts could be students. So the relationship among accounts and contacts is very much dependent on the business needs for which Microsoft CRM is being used for.
In our scenario let's consider we have CRM deployed for a health care institution. Let's set up a few accounts using the default setup.
Step 1
Go To Sales -> Accounts. You will see a list of accounts already created and other options as shown.
Step 2
Click on New and enter the data. You see summary information on the top.
As you scroll down, you see other detailed information to be filled in as shown below.
Step 3
Now to add the industry sector. I see a list of default industry sectors. I need to add the Oil & Gas sector since it is not present.
- Click on the Form and you will see as below.
Double-click on the field you want to modify.
- Click Edit, you see a dialog box. Click on Add and change the Label and Description.
- Click Save.
- Click Publish.
- You see this item in the drop down when you refresh the page.
Step 4
Now we will add contacts. Click on Sales -> Contacts. Let us click on Import data for contacts. You will see the following dialog. As see, you can import from Excel, XML, CSV, text and Zip format files.
Set the delimiters and click next. Select the correct mapping and click next.
Data is being submited for Import. We need to check the imports job to make sure there is no error.
If all goes well, the accounts will be imported into the CRM.
These are the basic steps. We will see more customizations in future articles.