Where to put attribute: at company or contact level?

kiwikeithNew Member

My third post in as many days--sorry if I'm sounding stupid but I want to get the system and its business rules set up properly before the data goes in. Where is the best place to put an attribute that you might use for doing a search selection--at the company level or the contact level???

Assuming that there will be some companies that we don't have a contact for and also assuming that there will be companies with multiple contacts each with different interests. A further assumption is we will be using Word for the mail merge.

If you assign the attribute to the company and run a search to generate a merge you are going to get just the company and not the contact who has the interest. The Receives mail for company choice in Maximizer doesn't work in Word as far as I can see. (Anyway, if you use the Max wordprocessor the receives mail option will then capture all the contacts in the company).

Secondly, you could assign the attribute to the contact exclusively but then you would need to create a dummy "Dear Sir/Madam" contact for those companies without a real contact?

Or thirdly (and I think I am hitting on the solution here just by typing it up {leftbrain/right brain?}

) you could assign the attribute to both the company and the contact and control the output of the search by specifying the party type in the Find Matching field??

What are others doing? TIA

[This message has been edited by Kiwi Keith (edited 30 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Kiwi Keith (edited 30 March 2001).]

3/30/0111:35 AM

❤️ 0

Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

ianwallaceNew Member

Hi,

This is a key problem that's at the root af many users problems when they seach with Maximizer. You right to spend time on it before you really get going.

Logically some UDFs should go on companies. However, your quite right you need to make it easy to search for contacts.

In General my rule is PROFILE THE CONTACTS, thats who you'll write to and who you need to find with the greatest ease.

If you want to duplicate the information on the company (and can actually get your staff to do this) fine.

It really depends whether the UDFs are informational or for grouping and searching. Its much less of an issue to put UDFs used only as informational fields on the company than it is those used for searching. Of course you can nearly always do the search, wherever you put the fields, you just need a better understanding of Maximizer if they're mixed across the companies and contacts.

Regards,

Ian Wallace
CABC

4/4/019:45 PM

❤️ 0

crm3000ltdNew Member

Fields relevant to the company should belong to the company, and those for contacts to contacts. It is not practical to keep the fields of the Company sunchronised with all the contacts.

Yes this does make it tricky when performing searches. But with some lateral thinking and using Select All, Retrieve Contacts, Invert Selection and Retrieve Contacts you can usually get the result you need.

No there is no 'receives mail sent to Company' option in MS Word. When using the Maximizer Word Processor this option merges with every contact that has this option ticked in the 'Mailing Addresses' tab of the data entry window. You are finding that you are merging with all the contacts, because by default this option is ticked for all new entries.

Regards

Paul van Cingel
CRM 3000 Ltd.

quote:
Originally posted by Kiwi Keith:
My third post in as many days--sorry if I'm sounding stupid but I want to get the system and its business rules set up properly [b]before the data goes in. Where is the best place to put an attribute that you might use for doing a search selection--at the company level or the contact level???

Assuming that there will be some companies that we don't have a contact for and also assuming that there will be companies with multiple contacts each with different interests. A further assumption is we will be using Word for the mail merge.

If you assign the attribute to the company and run a search to generate a merge you are going to get just the company and not the contact who has the interest. The Receives mail for company choice in Maximizer doesn't work in Word as far as I can see. (Anyway, if you use the Max wordprocessor the receives mail option will then capture all the contacts in the company).

Secondly, you could assign the attribute to the contact exclusively but then you would need to create a dummy "Dear Sir/Madam" contact for those companies without a real contact?

Or thirdly (and I think I am hitting on the solution here just by typing it up {leftbrain/right brain?} ) you could assign the attribute to both the company and the contact and control the output of the search by specifying the party type in the Find Matching field??

What are others doing? TIA

[This message has been edited by Kiwi Keith (edited 30 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Kiwi Keith (edited 30 March 2001).][/B]

4/5/0112:13 PM

❤️ 0

Skip to main content

Add Reply

Membership Required

Remove From Your Block List

Manage Follow Preferences

Block

Please wait...