Organisations, contacts and activities – the data model

To understand the CRM you only need three terms and one rule: organisation, contact, activity – and “everything attached to a contact gathers on its organisation”. Once you have internalised this, the rest almost explains itself.

Three levels

• The organisation is the superordinate element. Any number of contacts hang off it. You maintain superordinate information – address, industry, rating – once here, instead of attaching it to every contact.
• The contact carries the personal data: addresses, emails, phone numbers. What you know as a “contact” in Outlook or a classic address book is exactly this object here. There are also contacts without an organisation and contacts that are not people at all (accounts department, delivery address).
• The activity documents an action – call, email, quote, appointment, presentation. Some activities are created directly in teamspace (appointments, emails, quotes, invoices); for everything else there is the general CRM activity.

The inheritance of the address

As long as a contact carries no address of its own, it adopts the address of its organisation – which then becomes its preferred address. If you enter an address of its own, it overrides the inherited one. This makes two things easy:

• Company relocation: you change the address once on the organisation; all contacts without their own address move with it.
• Change of employer: you attach the contact to the new organisation – the company address switches across, all previous activities remain on the contact, and the history with the old company stays visible on the old organisation.

For a private household, the organisation and the main contact are often the same person – you do not create an additional contact, but work directly with the main contact.

The timeline gathers upwards

The real gain comes from the aggregation: an activity you create on a contact is automatically attached to its organisation as well. The organisation’s timeline is therefore the sum of the timelines of all its contacts.

This lets you answer questions that would be laborious without this structure:

• Who at company XY did we last have any contact with – no matter which colleague handled it?
• How much time have we booked against this organisation, and which projects and tickets ran with it?

Via the org chart you can even zoom into individual departments or subsidiary organisations and see the activities assigned there.

Hierarchy via parent and subsidiary

Organisations can be linked hierarchically: a company with two sites, a group with departments. The “children” in turn have the contacts attached. This keeps it visible that the Hamburg and Munich sites both belong to the same brand – and analyses can be drawn at any level.

A person can have different roles towards different organisations: an employed consultant at company A, at the same time an external data protection officer at company B. teamspace maps such cases via special contacts, which deliberately break out of the context of a single organisation – more on this in Key account managers, VIPs and service notes.

Notes

• Rule of thumb: Only contacts have contact data. The organisation carries the superordinate characteristics, the contact the personal ones.
• An activity with a Date in the future and an empty Completion date is planned; once the date slips into the past, it becomes a follow-up. The mechanics are described in Activities and follow-ups.
• Appointments, tickets, documents and projects are teamspace elements in their own right, not CRM activities – they still appear in the timeline on the contact and on the organisation.

Related topics

• CRM – Introduction CRM Introduction
• Create and manage organisations CRM How-to
• Create and manage contacts CRM How-to
• Digital customer file