what is a Company-Defined Field?
Account Management is where you can add new Accounts (organizations); add new Contacts (individuals); add / track Deals (business opportunities) pertaining to those Accounts and Contacts; and add new Leads (potential customers). Accounts are the companies that you are doing business with or hope to do business with. Contacts are customers or potential customers that typically work at your Accounts. Deals are the specific business interactions with your Accounts / Contacts that you hope will lead to revenue for your organization (you can have multiple Deals running simultaneously for each Account or Contact). Leads are potential customers who are not yet qualified as prospects, thus are currently suspects. Account data, Contact data, Deal data, and Lead Data is displayed in Built-in Fields (BIF) or in Company-Defined Fields (CDF), and is stored in a filterable / searchable database.
Application Administrators can re-term (rename) Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads, and most of those object's Built-in Fields within the application. Thus, anywhere in the application that normally displays the literal text "Account" will instead display your new term. This allows you to further customize the application to your organization's and industry's specific business terminology. For consistency, the Help documentation will continue to refer to these objects as Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads. Click for more information via the Help topic "Company-Defined Terms".
Some important definitions pertaining to Account Management:
Built-in Field (BIF) - A data field that comes prebuilt with the application, and can be modified in certain ways.
Company-Defined Field (CDF) - A data field custom built (and editable) by an Application Administrator.
List Queries - You can build filters that allow you to query and retrieve any subset of your Account records, Contact records, Deal records, or Lead records. The records retrieved display in your Account List, your Contact List, your Deal List, or your Lead List. You can only retrieve records to which you have View access.
List Layouts - Allow you to dictate which field columns are displayed for the records retrieved by your Account, Contact, Deal, or Lead queries.
Functionality applicable to all areas of Account Management (exceptions noted):
You can attach documents directly to any Account, Contact, Deal, or Lead. You cannot attach a document larger than 2 Megabytes (MB). For files larger than 2MB, use WinZip (available for free at www.winzip.com) to zip (compress) the file, and then attach it to the desired Account, Contact, Deal, or Lead.
You can add an unlimited number of Multi-Notes to any Account, Contact, Deal, or Lead.
When starting a new Deal for an Account, you will designate a Process (based on the steps you will need to take from contact to contract), Lead Source (where did the lead come from?), Products and/or Services to sell, the Primary Contact, and any additional Contacts. Using the Process you have chosen to associate with each Deal, the application automatically tracks all of your Deals. You'll be seamlessly guided step-by-step, allowing you to focus on selling, as opposed to putting energy into "Okay, what do I have to do next?".
You can automatically generate maps and driving directions to your Accounts', Contacts', and Leads' locations through a direct connection with Expedia.com.
You can define and display relationships between Accounts, relationships between Contacts, and relationships between Deals. This is also helpful for quickly navigating between related records.
Users with Offline privileges can subscribe to the Accounts, Contacts, and Deals (including Deal Steps) to which they have access and work with them on the road (without Internet access) in the Offline application.
Users with Send Email privileges can use the Microsoft Outlook Email plug-in -- directly from Outlook -- to automatically link email (sent and received) to Contacts (and manually to Deals) in the application.
Here are the different ways you can add Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads to the application. Note that not all methods will apply to each area of Account Management -- differences are noted below:
You can add Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads manually through your desktop browser in the appropriate add record pop-up.
You can import Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads (provided you have the appropriate Import privileges).
You can automatically add Accounts and Contacts via the Sync tool.
You can automatically add Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads via an External Data Capture Form.
You can add Accounts, Contacts, and Deals via a wireless device, provided you have Wireless/IM privileges.
You can add Accounts, Contacts, and Deals by uploading them from the Offline application, provided you have Offline privileges. (See the Help topic Overview: Offline for more information.)
Other Users with the appropriate access can add Accounts, Contacts, and Deals to you by reassigning ownership of those records.
Extended edition Users can also potentially add Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Leads via the Web Services API (provided they have some development resources on their end, and that an Application Administrator has given them API access).
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