Sorting contacts

Groups

Pearl allows you to create groups to make it easier to keep control of large number of contacts.
 
To view or edit the list of groups, click Contacts->Groups from the main menu. Groups can be assigned sub-groups, and contacts can be placed into more than one group. You may, for example, have four main groups: Customers, Suppliers, Business Services, and Staff. You can subdivide your groups as much as you like, but bear in mind that a lot of information is already held in the contact database elsewhere.
 
Whether a customer is retail price or trade price, for example, is stored as a setting so groups should not be used to differentiate between the two.
 
You can also set custom fields, which will allow you to display a list of contacts where the custom field is a certain value, regardless of the group. Generally if you select a main group anywhere in Pearl, the sub-groups will also be displayed/mail merged.
 
A contact can be in multiple groups. The contact is not duplicated, they are simply linked to more than one group. 
 
To move contacts between groups, open the contact details screen for the contact and select one or more groups in the "groups" tab. You can update the group of multiple contacts at once from the CRM screen:
 
  • Select the contact(s) required with the tickbox
  • Choose to "add" or "move" the selected contacts to a group using the options on the left hand side of the screen
  • Click the submit button

Statuses

In addition to the other ways of sorting your contacts, you may set a status. The statuses you have to choose from are editable; click Setup->Customer statuses from the main menu to add more statuses. These could be used to categories customers in a single group into different stages within a sales flow. For example, the statuses could be set as:

  • Not yet contacted
  • Good potential
  • Unlikely
  • Closed

Price groups

There are 3 price groups set up in Pearl to allow you to sell your products to different types of customers. These price groups are:

  • Retail
  • Trade
  • Distributor

However, these groups can be used in any way you wish. For example you are a large retailer of electronic equipment selling to the end user online, as well as selling bulk orders to stores for separate, onward sale to the end user. The end user would be charged at retail price, whilst the stores would be charged at trade price. Note that this has nothing to do with the price at which you buy products.

If a contact is set to trade price then when a sale order/quote is created for them, the trade prices will be used. If no trade price exists for a product, when creating an order this product will be hidden. When a user logs in to your website, all prices will be displayed using the correct price group.

Owner (contact manager)

Each of your contacts can be assigned to one of your members of staff. This is done either in the contact edit screen (for a single contact) or using the batch update tool in the CRM screen. If you are assigned as the manager for a contact then you can find all your contacts using the main menu "My contacts" link.

 




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