Tutorials / Basics

Basics . 3 min read

Add a contact

A contact is one person. Everything else in the system hangs off it: their messages, their jobs, their invoices, their appointments. Most of the time you will never add one by hand, because a form fill, a phone call or a chat creates the record automatically. But you will need to add one by hand the first time somebody gives you a card at a job site.

Add one

  1. Go to Contacts in the left menu, then Smart Lists.
  2. Click + Add Contact.
  3. Fill in what you have. Name, phone and email are the ones that matter.
  4. Click Save.

The three that decide everything

You can add a contact with just a name, and it will be close to useless in a month. Three fields do the real work:

  • Phone. No phone, no text, so no automatic follow up and no missed call text back. This is the single biggest cause of a lead going quiet.
  • Email. Needed for quotes, invoices and anything you send in bulk later.
  • Source. Where they came from. Without it you cannot tell later which advert, sign or referral is actually paying for itself.
Tag as you go. A tag is a label you choose, such as the suburb, the job type or "quoted, waiting". Adding two tags when you create the record takes four seconds and is what lets you pull a precise list months later. Adding them retrospectively to 400 contacts is a lost afternoon.

If the fields are not the ones you want

The form you see can be changed. Click Customise Form while adding a contact to choose which fields appear. If you need something the system does not have, such as roof type or lot number, that is a custom field and we can add it for you.

Adding a lot of people at once

Do not type in a list you already have. A spreadsheet can be imported in one go and the columns matched to the right fields. Send it to us and we will run the import, because a bad import is far more work to unpick than it is to do properly once.

Before you create a second record for somebody

Search first, by phone or email rather than by name. Duplicates are the most common mess in any CRM, usually the same person under a mobile and an office number. If you do end up with two, they can be merged rather than deleted, which keeps both histories.

Next: Add an opportunity

Want this set up for you?

Configuration is part of what Marathon Creative does. Ask and it is done properly once.

Request a demo