Your Accounts, or Company Accounts, are the fundamental data needed to use your CRM system. An Account is an organisation that you deal with and the quality of data you enter in Accounts will determine the success of your CRM.
In this screen you will see:
- Overview: You will see an overview of accounts and you can edit these accounts
- Add: You can add accounts individually in this module
- Columns: You can manage your grid columns
Overview
Your CRM system allows you to record a large amount of data about each of your Accounts and to specify the Account Type. Examples of Account Types might be customers, prospects, old customers, press contacts or anyone else you deal with.
You can add your own custom fields to define the Account Types and to log data that is specific to your business, for example, warranty dates or model number. You will read more about this under the heading: Columns.
In the overview you can:
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Filter and search accounts:
You can sort your Accounts data by clicking on the column titles or field names (e.g. Account Name, Source), or you can search for the information you want using the Search bar. - View an account: click on an account and view the account details.
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Perform various actions on an account by checking the checkbox:
- Delete: delete an account
- Export: export the account info as a csv or excel file
- Copy: copy account information
- Bulk Update: with this option you can update information of multiple accounts at the same time.
- Merge To: merge an existing account with another account
- Add to Tag: use tags to filter and create automated campaigns
- Create Tag: create a new tag to filter and create automated campaigns
Account details
When you click on an account you will see the following tabs and information:
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Details:
All the registered account information. -
Account insights:
Additional, enriched account information like company size and industry coming from Spotler Leads populated by Spotler Connect -
Contacts:
o View the underlying contacts (employees) of an account.
o Delete a contact by ticking the delete checkbox and clicking the Delete button.
o Add a new contact by clicking + Add or entering details under existing contacts and clicking the Save icon.
o When you click on the name of the contact the contact details will be shown. You can click the edit button to edit the details. -
Tasks:
View all tasks associated with the account, such as meetings, calls, or events. Overdue tasks are shown in red. The Owner of the task is displayed in the Initials column on the right. Actions:
o Edit a task by clicking the date.
o Delete a task by ticking the delete box and clicking Save.
o Add a new task by clicking + Add. -
Activities:
View all Activities associated with the account. You can add, edit, and delete activities in the same way as tasks. -
Opportunities:
View all Opportunities for the account. Add, edit, or delete opportunities using the same process as tasks and activities. -
Quotations:
View quotations associated with the account. -
Account documents:
Any documents associated with this account that have been uploaded. You can open a document by clicking on it’s name. You can upload a new document by clicking on the + Add button.
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Digital activities:
View all Digital activities, like page views, email activity and form submits. You can export Digital activities and add tags. -
Campaign Details
If your company is using the the CRM's internal marketing module you will also see all the campaign details for Contacts in this account
Grid view
You can edit the view by clicking on the icon next to More. Do you like to see the view as tabs or as drop down menus. This option works like a toggle. So you switch views if you click on this icon.
Complete the details for the new account and Save. The only mandatory fields are the Account Name and Account Owner. The Account Owner is the person in your organisation responsible for managing that account. The CRM will automatically create a dropdown list of your CRM Users in the Account Owner field for you to select from.
Account permissions
Whether you can view and edit an Account depends upon your security permissions. Accounts that you can’t view won’t have hyperlinks from the Accounts list page, and those you can’t edit won’t have Save and Delete buttons.
Add
If you are just starting out and have just a few Accounts to load you can add them one at a time using the + Add button.
You will see a new screen with input fields for the details of an account:
Most of the fields are self-explanatory:
- Prospect: Somebody who you are trying to sell to.
- Suspect: Somebody who is in your target marketplace but you are not currently trying to have a dialogue with.
- Customer: Somebody who has previously bought from you.
Bulk import
If you already have data stored in another format (e.g. spreadsheets, Outlook, another CRM system) you can import the data in bulk to your CRM. You will need to prepare your data as a .CSV file or Excel file. If you use any specific terminology to describe your data fields you may also want to read up on Custom Settings for your CRM. Read more about bulk import of accounts in the article: How to import accounts?
Duplicates Accounts Check
When you create a new Account the CRM will check if an Account with the same name already exists and warn you. It will do this after you’ve completed the Account Name field and before you’ve entered the rest of the page, to save you filling the whole page in only to realise that the Accounts is already in your CRM system. You’ll get a message on your screen warning you. You can choose to ignore the warning by clicking the “ignore” button.
Columns
You can select which fields show on the grid and the order they appear by clicking the Columns button. You can select the fields you want to see from the dropdown list and use the drag & drop to change the order they appear on the grid. Then click Save. If you have more columns than will fit to your screen size, a scroll bar will appear at the bottom of the table so you can slide across to view them.
On the grid, you can sort your data by clicking on the column header, e.g. by Name, Date, Type, Status etc. The column header that the data is sorted by will be highlighted in blue text.