Looking for way to tie a Business Contact to more than one Account

[chockomonkey]

Our accounts are setup so that there is typically the same primary contact for many accounts.

For example, our client "Reid Lumber." They have many locations in this state, so we have multiple accounts set up... "Reid Lumber: Seattle" etc.

However, they all use the same Marketing person as the contact.

How would we pull this off?

Thanks,

Chocko

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I'd either use one contact period or 1 called Reid lumber: All (or marketing or something like that) and if i needed phone numbers and addresses for other locations, make a contact for them too. I probably wouldn't include the same email address over and over...

 

[chockomonkey]

I'd either use one contact period or 1 called Reid lumber: All (or marketing or something like that) and if i needed phone numbers and addresses for other locations, make a contact for them too. I probably wouldn't include the same email address over and over...

Thanks for your quick reply. I see you're a mod here, so thanks for that too--and for these forums if you were involved in their creation. It's amazing to me that this is seriously the ONLY place on the internet to talk about BCM. Anyway, props for creating a community for BCM--whoever deserves the credit =P

I had just found in Microsoft's faqs... "Only one Account can be linked to a Business Contact at any time." So that's definiely out. You're right, i should look into other ways of handing this instead of simply re-creating the data the same way i had it in our old (very archaic) program.

I'm going to have a meeting with our account managers and see if we can iron this out.

Cheers!

 

[Diane Poremsky]

That's one account per contact - you can have multiple contacts per account. But I would not duplicate the manager's address in each contact. Without knowing how you use the different locations, i'd use 1 account and create contacts for the locations.




PS glad you like the forum.

 

[GollyJer]

Unless I'm miss-understanding the question this should work.

Go to Account > Form Layout > Add Fields > New...

Create a new Data type: Relationship field.

Field name: Marketing Contact

Destination field name: Marketer for

This allows you to define one or more Marketing Contacts for each account and allows a Contact to be associated with more than one Account.

To take it one step further you can create a custom business contact type and call it Marketer. Then convert all your general contacts that are actually marketing people to the Marketer contact type. Then, when you create the relationship field as described above you can limit the "Destination record type:" dropdown to Marketers.

Hope that helps.

 

[ChrisD]

That was great. I have just started using BMC but I'm using it in a not trad way. I have farm families that I consult with and wanted to know what banker, marketer, agronomist, etc. they were working with. I have to work with them for financial sponsorships and to answer any questions my farmers may have.

As I worked with the program I set up Farmers as the accounts and was trying to get bankers in for business contacts. Of course one banker might work with several of my farm families. I did set up the new field as a banker field and related that back to a custom banker contact form. I am in the process of creating a form for each of the additional professions that a farmer may work with and adding a new field in the account form. It works great.

Thanks so much