TeamGram stores your customer database in two sets of connected records: Contacts (real people) and companies (businesses where your contacts work).
Note that leads are not considered as “customers” until they are qualified and converted. Learn more about leads and conversion.
Your customer database is a valuable asset. A simple list of contacts is not enough to fully utilize this powerful business tool. If you are selling to businesses, you will also want to capture the relationships between people and the companies they work for.Your customer may be a company, but your contacts are real people. They may get reassigned, change jobs, and may even stop working there. You will want to manage your relationships with your contacts, as well as the companies they work for.
Imagine having a series of meetings with multiple people in the same company at different times. You then hear that one of them has quit his job. You will want to know what information was shared with this person, so you can contact the new person replacing him and share that information again to continue your sales efforts. If you are not managing relations at the contact level, it can be difficult to know what was discussed with whom, leading to a potential loss of information and possibly loss of sales.
On the other hand, managing relations at the contact level alone is not enough either. When you are negotiating with a contact, you are actually negotiating with the company your contact works for. The sum of your interactions with different contacts in a company constitutes your relationship with that company, even if some of those contacts stop working there.
Contacts
Contacts are people you have business relationships with.
The more information you collect about your contacts, the more useful they become. At a minimum, you will want to store basic information like names, companies, positions, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., so you can easily reach them when needed. After all, you can’t sell to a contact you can’t reach.
Using TeamGram, you can do a lot more with contacts than just storing basic information. You can tag and filter them according to specific interests, industries, specializations, regions, etc. so you can instantly compile a short list of the kind of contacts you need at any time.
You can also record your interactions (phone calls, meetings, emails, etc) so at any time you can pull up your complete history with them.
To create a new contact, click on the contacts tab on the left sidebar and then click on the New Contact button. Fill out the details. Note that when you enter the first few characters of the company name, TeamGram will search its database for companies with similar names in your database and suggest them as options. If you see the company this contact works for, select it from the list. If not, select New company at the bottom of the suggestion list. If you select new company, TeamGram will automatically create a new company record as well, and link this contact to it. The next time you enter a new contact working for this company, you will be able to select it from the suggestion list.
Companies
If you are selling to businesses, your contacts are not your customers. Your customers are the companies your contacts work for. It is not enough to store information only about contacts and your relationship with them, because contacts may change jobs, or you may have to deal with multiple contacts working for the same company in order to close a single deal.
TeamGram allows you to add as many contacts as needed to a single company you do business with.
Just like contacts, you can store basic information like addresses and phone numbers for each company, tag and filter them, and record your interactions. You can also easily view all contacts you know in a company.
Being able to add multiple contacts to the same company is a powerful sales tool. You can click on a contact, then click on the company name under that person’s name, go to the contacts tab of that company, and instantly view who else you know there. Clicking each of those contacts will give you more detailed information about your past dealings with them.
This can be a good way to find allies and positive referral sources within the company you are selling to.
If you can identify a technical person your support team helped in the past, you may want to bring up their happy experiences with you in your next sales call with others in that company.
