The sales process supported by the CRM has been divided into the following steps:

You will find a more detailed description in section: The Sales Process.

Leads are your first contact to a prospective customer. You may collect leads from your marketing activities such as trade shows, advertisement, presentations etc. Probably, most of your leads will not lead to a business.

	Tip
	If you click [New Lead] at the Quick-Create menu, you are offered a quick entry menu for leads, but only for name, company, phone and e-mail entries.

If you want to collect more detailed lead information, you may click the [Sales] tab at the navigation area shown in figure: Top Area. Use the plus icon to open the edit view for a new lead as shown in figure: New Lead. Now you can enter all the lead information you have.

	Important
	Entry field marked by a "*" are mandatory.

	Note
	With version 5.0.4 role based pick lists have been introduced. Please refer to chapter: Picklist Editor for more information.

Click [Save] to send your entries to the CRM system.

Figure 2.1. New Lead

	Tip
	If you create a lead, this lead will be assigned to you automatically. You may assign the lead to a different CRM user or user group by changing the content of the "Assigned To:" field to a different person or to a team.

It is most efficient way is to create a new account from a lead as described at section: Creating Potentials from Leads. However, sometimes it will be necessary to enter new accounts directly. This is helpful, for instance, if you want to have competitors, private contacts or special contacts also stored in your CRM system. Since account information can contain references to contacts, it is always advisable to enter the account information first before you take care about the contact information. When you add a contact to the CRM system later, the related account information will already be available.

To create a new account, click [New Account] at the entry Quick-Create menu shown in figure: Top Area or goto [Sales] -> [Accounts] and click the plus icon. An new window will open as shown in figure: New Account - Basic Information.

Figure 2.2. New Account - Basic Information

Now you can enter the basic account information. You should only enter information which is relevant to you or to your business. The illustration exemplify already some entries. Non-relevant entry fields can remain empty or should be removed by your CRM system administrator. You may also consider to use customized fields. If several user have writing access to the same entry fields, make sure that you agree on a common standard for making entries.

	Note
	With version 5.0.4 role based pick lists have been introduced. Please refer to chapter: Picklist Editor for more information.

In case you want to use the Locate Map function of the CRM system in another country than the USA, you must include the country information.

You may add further account information by clicking the [More Information] tab as shown in figure: New Account - More Information.

Figure 2.3. New Account - More Information

Important

Some entry fields refer to information already stored in the CRM system. You can see this, for instance, for the Member of entry in figure: New Account - More Information. Here you cannot make a direct entry. You have to click the folder icon at the end of this line. Then a new window will open that displays the data already stored at the CRM system. When you make a selection this window will close automatically.

Click the [Save] button to transfer your data to the CRM system.

If you want to enter contact information to individuals, please click [New Contact] at the entry Quick-Create menu or goto [Sales] -> [Contacts] and click the plus icon. A new window as shown in figure: New Contact - Basic Information will open.

Figure 2.4. New Contact - Basic Information

The offered standard fields are self-explanatory. Make sure that all CRM users agree on the same purpose for each entry field. Your CRM administrator may remove those standard fields which are not suitable for your company based on profiles, or add additional entry fields as explained in chapter: User Administration.

	Note
	With version 5.0.4 role based pick lists have been introduced. Please refer to chapter: Picklist Editor for more information.

If you click the [More Information] tab shown at figure: New Contact - Basic Information, you may add further information to the contact as illustrated in figure: New Contact - More Information.

Figure 2.5. New Contact - More Information

While most are self-explanatory, the following fields serve special purposes:

You may also use this entry page to allow contacts to access the Customer Portal. The Customer Portal provides contacts with a limited access to the CRM help desk functions. Please refer to section: Customer Portal in this manual and to the Customer Portal manual (see Appendix: Ressources) for further information.

Caution

If you enable the customer portal for a contact by marking the Portal User check box, the CRM system will automatically generate an e-mail and will sent it to this contact immediately upon your clicking the [Save] button. (Your outgoing mail server must be configured.) This e-mail will contain the user name and password for accessing the customer portal. It is advised to inform your contact of this automatically generated message in advance by a separate e-mail.

Click the [Save] button to transfer the entries to the CRM system.

The export and import functions will help you to exchange data between your office environment and the CRM system. CRM data can be used by a large variety of other applications at your office.

	Tip
	In addition to leads, contacts, accounts, and vendors, data for products and potentials can be imported and exported. Furthermore, notes and e-mails can be exported. Please refer to the proper sections in this manual for further information.

To export or to import data, click a module name as shown in figure: Top Area. You will get to the List View . At the top of the list, as shown in figure: Contact List View, you will find the import and export tools icons.

Figure 2.6. Contact List View

	Important
	You can only use the export and import tools if they have been enabled by the CRM system administrator.

	Note
	The CRM system is using a character set which is UTF-8 (Unicode compatible) coded. Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world's writing systems.

	Tip
	For the importing and exporting contact data, you may also consider the MS Outlook plugin for Windows computer or the Thunderbird extension for Linux, Mac and Windows, as they are provided with the CRM system.

The following section describes the import and export function for contacts. If you want to import or export accounts or other modules, you can use this description accordingly.

Import Contacts

Click [Import Contacts] at the Tool tab as shown at figure: Contact List View. A new window will open as shown in figure: Import Contacts, Step 1

Figure 2.7. Contact Import, Step 1

You have to select your data source by browsing your computer or network.

	Note
	You can find sample import data at section: Data Format for Imports. This section also explains how you can create your own data sources. If your data contain more information than the available fields in the CRM system can provide, you can start to use User Defined Fields as explained in section: Custom Fields.

Important

Because of possible timeouts with the CRM standard version it is suggested not to import more than 499 customer contacts with a single import operation. (Your administrator may change this number.) If you have to import more data, you need to split your files before import and repeat the import operation. All the data you intend to import must contain the mandatory fields as they are marked by a [*] sign at the contacts edit view.

If you have created a file that meets the requirements, you can upload the file into the CRM system. Click [Next] to continue.

For the second step, a new window will open as shown in figure: Contact Import, Step 2.

Figure 2.8. Contact Import, Step 2

At this site you have to link your data with the according CRM fields. You see the standard fields as they are offered by the CRM, and your custom fields if you have created them beforehand. It is not necessary that you to create references for all data types in your file, but you must link the mandatory fields. In the illustration you can see sample entries.

	Tip
	If you have to make multiple imports, the CRM offers you to store the references you have selected for future use. Mark the check box [Save as Custom Mapping] and write a name of this reference into the entry field. Make sure that this name has not been used before. This Custom Mapping will be available at step 2 as Use Saved Mapping when you make the next import.

When you have set all references, click [Import Now] to transfer your data to the data base.

At the last import step the CRM shows you the result of the import operation as you can see it in figure: Contact Import, Step 3. Below you will see a list of all imported contacts.

Figure 2.9. Contact Import, Step 3

Now you can review your import, accept it or reject it.

	Tip
	If you import contacts with account information, the import will generate contact and account entries which refer to each other. During an import the CRM checks whether the contacts account name already exists. If it does, it will link the imported contact to the existing account automatically. Therefore, it is recommended to import accounts first.

	Note
	The vtiger community is very active in developing CRM extensions that may help you to import data from other CRM applications and other programs. You may check out these community projects at the online vtiger forge.

Export Data

With version 5.0.4 the export functions have been improved. You may select the following criteria for your export:

• all records of this module

• only the records you have marked at the list view of this module

• all records which meets your search criteria at the list view of this module

• all data of the current page at the list view of this module without search criteria set

	Important
	Your data are exported in the UTF-8 format. For further use you may have to convert these date to the character set used in your language. Please refer to chapter: UTF-8 coding tools for further information about UTF-8 and convenient conversion tools.

Therefore you have to make your decision at the list view about the data you would like to export, before you hit the export icon. For instance, if you would like to export all records of contacts where the last name starts with a B, make a search as explained in section: List Search with B as your search criteria. Afterwards hit the [export icon] at the list view menu, if this function is available to you, and the menu as shown in figure: Export selection will be displayed.

Figure 2.10. Export selection

At this menu you may change you selection criteria if desired and click the [Export Contacts] button. A new window for uploading data to your computer opens. The upload window you will see depends on your operating system. If you have a Windows computer, you will see a window as shown in figure: Export Contacts.

Figure 2.11. Export Contacts

If you click [OK], all data will be exported to your computer. The data are provided as ASCII file with comma separated values, also called CSV format.

	Important
	Since the format of the exported data is different than the data format required for an import you cannot use exported data for an import directly.

Before you can import data you have to format these data in order to meet the CRM's requirements.

The first requirement is that the data must be presented in the ASCII format with comma separated values (CSV). The CSV file format is often used to exchange data between disparate applications.

	Note
	A common standard for the CSV format does not exist.

If you want to import data, these data must be formatted according to the following rules:

In figure: Sample for Lead Import File a sample file for lead import is shown. Each line represents a data set.

Figure 2.12. Sample for Lead Import File

	Important
	If you do not have all a full set of lead data available, you must use wrap an empty entry by double-quote characters as it can be seen in the figure above for the missing telephone number in line 3.

The second requirement is that all your data must use the UTF-8 character set. Please refer to chapter: UTF-8 coding tools for further information.

The third requirement is that you have to include custom fields with your import if you have created such fields before. In case you do not have a content for the custom fields you may leave the field in your data list empty but you must import it. If you do not import these fields, the status of these fields in your CRM's database remains undefined and you can not use such fields for filter functions.

The file formats used in Microsoft Excel have become a pseudo standard throughout the industry, even among non-Microsoft platforms.

Excel is an application that also produces and uses CSV. Unfortunately, depending on your Excel version the import of CSV data may cause some problems. Some Excel versions do not automatically accept comma separated values. If you experience that after open of exported CRM data, all fields are listed in one column, you may use the following instructions for clean them up:

	Tip
	If your data contain line feed or carriage return characters, you have to remove these before importing the data into Excel. Such characters might be created by the CRM system if you have entries that use multiple lines. This might for instance be the case if you separate street name and suite number in an address entry by an additional line.

If you want to import contact data from you office application, you need to make sure that these data a well formed. The following list describes how you may use contact data from your MS Outlook: