Contact management

Sales speed depends on context. When a record shows the role, the company and the last three conversations, a rep opens a call already knowing the story. Without that, the same person gets entered twice from a web form and a manual note, their history splits across two cards, a report counts them twice and a colleague reopens a deal someone already lost.

Contact records also hold personal data. Under GDPR, a business needs a lawful reason to keep them, a note of where each contact came from and a way to delete them on request. Tidy records make that possible.

• Capture the baseline fields when a contact is created: name, title, company, email, phone and preferred channel.
• Log emails, calls and meetings against the contact automatically, so history never depends on someone remembering to write it down.
• Check for an existing match before creating a record, so duplicates never form.
• Add only the custom fields the business uses, such as industry, company size or buying role, rather than every field a template offers.
• Link every contact to a company record, so outreach to one organisation stays coordinated.
• Record the source and consent status of each contact.

Contact management is how a business stores and maintains information about the people it sells to, works with and supports. Each person gets one record. The record holds the basics (name, role, company, email, phone), where they came from, who owns the relationship and every email, call and meeting logged against them. A CRM such as HubSpot or Pipedrive is the usual home for it.

• Letting each rep keep a private list. The team then has no shared record.
• Importing old lists without cleaning them first.
• Creating dozens of custom fields that nobody fills in.