Introduction
Contact management is a challenge in professional services organisations; new business often hinges on personal relationships and so capturing all contacts with your clients is important but, paradoxically, their importance can lead to a reluctance to share them across the organisation. This is partly due to the effort involved and partly anxiety about sharing details about long cultivated relationships with the wider organisation. evergreen sales seeks to address these challenges by making effective use of the underlying Dynamics 365 for Sales functionality and adding custom functionality, particularly automating the capture of contacts from incoming emails and highlighting “who knows who” more clearly.
Key processes
The table below lists the main, high-level processes associated with contact management, which evergreen sales is able to handle:
| Process name | Sub-process name | Description |
| Create a contact | Create a contact for an organisation | This process supports the creation of contacts who work for an organisation, ie an Account record. This could be an existing customer or a prospective customer (ie a prospect) |
| Capture contacts automatically | Capture contacts from incoming emails | evergreen sales has a process that scans the signature blocks of incoming emails and uses the extracted information to create potential contacts for subsequent review and conversion into new contacts. |
| Review and edit potential contacts | This feature allows contact owners the ability to review, edit and convert potential contacts into “real” contacts. It also distinguishes between new contacts and potentially new data about existing contacts so that different processing can be used. | |
| Convert contact from potential to active | Once satisfied with a potential contact, it is converted into a “real” contact by clicking the “convert to contact” button. | |
| Maintain a contact | Link a contact to the organisations with whom they have a relationship | Once created, a contact record can be easily edited, adding all sorts of additional information about the person. This includes linking them to organisation(s) to whom they are related. |
| Relationship strength | Calculate relationship strength | evergreen sales monitors user’s Outlook account to identify emails and appointments exchanged with a contact. Once identified (but not stored) a configurable scoring mechanism is used to indicate the strength of the relationship between the people involved in the communication. When done at an organisation wide level, this will give a good indication of “who knows who”; a common question in professional services organisations |
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