I do not use secondary contacts in Act CRM

 ACT allows your to create what they call a secondary contact and I never advise my clients to use this option.  This video explains why.

Video Transcript

Hi ladies and gentlemen, this is Tony Holowitz. I want to talk to you about an option and act to create. What’s called a secondary contact. When you look at act, there’s a tab and act called secondary contacts. And what it allows you to do is come down here and put in. What’s referred to as a secondary contact. It might be someone who just is a random contact at a company, and you just want to keep their name just in case. My experience has been this, a lot of what act comes down to is keeping the information organized in a concise and efficient way. This actually has nothing to do with the software, has to do with thinking about how you want to have information in there. A lot of, you know, I’m a big fan of the ID status. I feel it’s the most important field and act when you have a secondary contact, a lot of times it might be an assistant or a secretary or an employee at a company in which you have a contact.

And that’s where a lot of people want to put the secondary contact. The dilemma I have with that is you’re limited in the things you can do with that secondary contact. So I never, ever, ever recommend people put a secondary contact in what I do recommend is make them a contact under the company in which they fall. So, in other words, if it’s a employee of a company, simply go up to contacts and go down to where it says duplicate contact, and you can make a duplicate of this contact, but fill in, for example, Fred Smith’s name. Now, this is the thing, the main reason people want to organize their data efficiently and smartly is because you want to be able to look up people. So for example, if you want to look up people that are clients and send, ’em an email, you can do that. If you want to find your prospects, you can do that and so forth in many companies, if you have more than one person using act, if your fellow actors are in the act database, which typically they would be, you want to make sure you define them in some way.

And a quite typical way is give them an ID status of employee. In other words, the employees of your company, but the dilemma is this. When you have people that are not part of your company and they’re employees of another company, how do you identify them? Well, that’s really quite simple. In my opinion, you just got to come up with another ID for the ID status or another idea for the ID status, I should say. And there’s many things you can use. For example, I went and did a look up of Sy synonyms for employee. And you could use just as an example, any one of these ideas. Okay. One of the ones that I would suggest, where was it? I think it was, uh, BA BA where’d it go? Uh, staff member right here is one of the ones that I saw that I liked.

So if you have a secondary contact, put ’em in, act, put ’em in so that you can reach out to them. Should you need to, and just give them a unique ID status that signifies they’re really not someone who makes a decision. They’re just sort of a secondary employee and maybe that’s what you could use, secondary employee, but put something in there, anything, and don’t use secondary context. I don’t see it as doing anything good for you. And it really limits some of the things you can do just for your knowledge. If you do use secondary contexts right now, and you say, yep, that makes sense. There are tools that you can get inexpensively that will take all those secondary contacts and make ’em primary contacts. So think it through and don’t use secondary contacts. My name is Tony Holowitz. Thank you very much.